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Chaos and a Creed 


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Chaos and a Creed 


BY JAMES PRICEMAN fesevci ) 








NEW YORK AND LONDON 
Harper & Brothers, Publishers 
1925 


CHAOS AND A CREED 


Copyright, 1925 
By Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the U. S. A. 


First Edition 
A-Z 








To 
the friend 
who made possible 
the writing of 
this book 





Vil. 


VIII. 


Contents 
The Reason for this Book 
The Manner of Approach 
The Historical Background 
The Four Biographies of Jesus 


Old Words and Old Meanings 


PAGE 


25 


43 


65 


The Supernormal, its Relation to Faith 105 


The Autobiography of Jesus 
Creation versus Chaos 


A Creed 


171 


245 


268 


ey 


is 
aS 
Pp liate 
af 


ine vi iy 4 


Bs 





‘To the Reader 


& VERY reader of this book has the right 
to know my reasons for employing a pseudo- 
nym. The convictions stated in these pages 
are the outcome of experience so profound 
and so bewildering that no lip creed could have 
met it. For my path there was no choice but 
to test, step by step, my own faith, but if, while 
I was thus struggling to establish the fownda- 
tions of my belief, I had known that this 
volume would appear over my own signature, 
I could not have written it so frankly. The 
modern world cries out for mysticism, but too 
often denies to mysticism the very conditions 
that permit its existence. The first requisite 
for any book that tries to express a vital per- 
sonal religion is solitude—the solitude of ano- 
nymity quite as much as the actual mountain 
solitude in which this confession of faith was 
written. 

“James Priceman’” is, however, more than a 


TO THE READER 


pseudonym. It was only by means of the thin 
veil of an imaginary personality that I could 
secure the detachment necessary for a clear 
presentation of my convictions. More and 
more, as each chapter developed, the pen-name 
came to signify for me merely a typical E'very- 
man, seeking his way through a world of mys- 
tery and challenge. My profoundest wish for 
this book is that “James Priceman” may be 
utterly forgotten in the portrait he has humbly 
tried to paint. 
Spring, 1925 
THE AUTHOR 


Chaos and a Creed 


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Chapter I: The Reason 
for this Book 


HE chief motive of this book is clarification 
of my own creed. In an age of spiritual 
isolation, an age without leaders in statesman- 
ship, or philosophy, or art, or religion, no man 
among us can trust any other man to do his 
thinking for him. In the immense ferment of 
the present, when men and women are yeasty 
with unaccustomed and often unwelcome 
leaven, every man who tries to make reckon- 
ing with himself of his own opinions is, in his 
own small degree, serving his generation. If, 
having found for himself a few conclusions, he 
can then make these articulate for others, he 
stands as one passing speaker on that great 
forum of the printed page, where, above all in 
our thought processes, we each need what small 

illumination we can offer one another. 
Each one of us is to-day forced to a voyage 

1 


2 ' CHAOS AND A CREED 


of lonely discovery, for which past history is 
as challenging to the honest explorer as the 
present and the future, for no era, not even our 
own, is ever so unprecedented as it thinks it- 
self. All we can say to one another is, Here or 
here or here after stormy sailing I found a 
haven, but it is impossible to say whether for 
another man it will offer the same assurance 
of safety. Much of what I to-day set forth may 
be changed by the new issues of to-morrow, 
for I am merely trying to take stock of what 
I find to be my own working creed—the creed 
not of a theologian, nor of a philosopher, but of 
a plain man speaking to other plain men and 
women. We are each of us, I believe, contin- 
ually puzzled by impulses and actions which we 
know to rise from that obscure region of our 
being vaguely labeled spiritual. While we 
always hesitate to investigate this region, each 
man for himself, we are always a little restless 
and uneasy until we have done so. In my own 
humble exploration of my own faith, I must 
mark some spots as still dark with enigma, but 
to define these dim places as sharply as the 
clearer ones, will help, for no man gets very far 


THE REASON FOR THIS BOOK 3 


in any direction until he has forced his doubts 
to be as valiant as his convictions. 

There is another motive in my writing this 
book. It is often easier to speak to one’s 
friends in print than in conversation. My life 
has lain for the most part among intellectual 
people, active, questing men and women. Very 
few of these friends of mine share my point 
of view, and in ordinary talk I find it impos- 
sible to explain my attitude. No matter how 
sympathetically we may discuss some living 
issue, always the logic of the others in its ul- 
timate reference harks back to their funda- 
mental premise that this world is a tremendous 
accident, while my logic rests on the opposite 
premise, that this world has a transcendent 
plan. Incessantly this demarcation is perceived 
by both sides with a distressing mutual puzzle- 
ment and silence. Many a man in this same 
predicament, that of an obstinate belief in 
an unseen personal agency directing all our 
affairs, must share with me the long sup- 
pressed impulse to speak out once for all his 
answer to the agnosticism and the cynicism 
implicit in half the people he meets and in nine- 


4 CHAOS AND A CREED 


tenths of the volumes he reads. In this book I 
would make clear to my friends, as well as to 
myself, the reasons for my faith, asking them 
to believe that I have come to it by processes 
as sincere as those by which they have arrived 
at an equally honest agnosticism. One thing 
will always seem strange to me, that belief in 
God should so often be regarded as the easy 
refuge of the simple-minded, and disbelief be 
thought the special prerogative of people who 
think for themselves. For myself, I have never 
met in any person, nor in any printed word, the 
agnosticism and the cynicism that I have com- 
bated within myself, and yet the arguments for 
a God back of this universe seem to me forever 
greater than the arguments against him. 

This is a period of live thinking. One has 
only to compare the magazines of to-day with 
those of ten years ago to see that more people 
are able to write well than ever before in our 
history, and that more people are able to read 
and ponder what is being written. The hours 
just before dawn are always a time shaken 
both by hope and by fear, a time when porten- 
tous forces are surmised in the darkness. It 


THE REASON FOR THIS BOOK 5 


is an arresting fact that a book like Papini’s 
Life of Christ should to-day be a best seller. 
In view of that fact writers who lightly dismiss 
religion as an exhausted force are like men 
shouting against the roaring of a freshet, the 
news that March snows can no longer melt nor 
rivers swell. It is a day of splendid testing of 
the individual, just because it is a day without 
subjection to any form of authority. Nothing 
is stronger proof of the weakness of each than 
the hysterical insistence of government, law, 
religion, and science, that each still possesses 
its obsolete authority, and the refusal of each 
humbly to incorporate into its decadence that 
vitalizing principle which shall give to each a 
new authority. That which is accepted never 
needs argument. The absence of accepted lead- 
ership leaves each man free to follow the far- 
discerned gleam of a leadership, not dead, but 
incessantly resurgent. 


Chapter II: —The Manner 
of Approach 


The Present Confusion of Thought 


i one could make a cross section of Ameri- 
can thought to-day, cutting straight down 
from top to bottom of social and intellectual 
strata, one would find the utmost variety of 
opinion, and yet at the same time one would 
discover within each stratum a most energetic 
sifting of its own opinions. Many of our 
thinkers are invalidating religion at the same 
moment that great groups of people are en- 
gaged in such fiery controversy as never before 
occurred in our annals. People fight over reli- 
gion only when it is very much alive. Every- 
where all classes are thinking and questioning. 
While many Christians are defending their 
ancient strongholds with a heat that betrays 
far too much hatred to be convincing of 
6 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 7 


spiritual healthiness, braver churchmen are 
examining church institutions and creeds and. 
Scripture with scientific candor. The chief 
intellectual leaders of the day have elevated 
Freudianism, which should be a science and 
a means, into a philosophy and an end, and 
have then accepted it with a finality a little sur- 
prising since, in a universe that Freudianism 
itself postulates as evolutional, no philosophy 
could be final. 

Of the great mass of people, always reluc- 
tant to do its own thinking, but forced to it 
nowadays by the sheer discomfort of existing 
institutions as at present these function, the 
majority accepts the views of the churches with 
both the confidence and the inflammability with 
which the Jews of long ago took the teachings 
of their scribes. On the other hand, a smaller 
number of the so-called masses receive the 
agnosticism of science and the philosophy of 
Freudianism quite as uncritically as the aver- 
age Christian welcomes clerical guidance. One 
wonders if the intellectuals reckon fully with 
the effect of their tenets, as these sift down to 
less educated minds and affect the daily con- 


8 CHAOS AND A CREED 


duct of crude men unrestrained by any per- 
sonal idealism. It did not prove a good thing 
for national survival that Greece expected its 
learned men to drop the gods, and its less 
learned men to keep them. 

Yet through all the varying kinds and quan- 
tities of religion and of irreligion to be observed 
in American thought to-day, it 1s everywhere 
evident that each man’s faith or no-faith is to 
him a vital issue. Any one of us may be mis- 
taken, but not one of us is sleepy. ‘The rising 
tide against materialism is pushing everywhere. 
We have become accustomed to it, or we should 
be startled to see religion appearing nakedly 
in places where its mention two decades ago 
would have been indecorous, in newspaper edi- 
torials, in magazine articles, in chambers of 
commerce, in conventions of lawyers. But it is 
religion with a difference. We may look on 
while fundamentalists and modernists wran- 
gle, glad of this witness to spiritual vitality, 
but curiously aware all the while of another 
observer standing apart in ironic silence while 
the meaning of his death is argued in maddened 
words. Somehow thinking men and women 


~ 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 9 


to-day are not so much concerned with why 
Jesus died as with why he is still alive. It is 
easy enough for rationalism to argue down 
the creed called Christian, for too much ugli- 
ness has been committed in its name, but the 
man called Christ is not so easily disposed of. 
There is even a hint of comicality in efforts to 
. preach a new social order and at the same time 
not to plagiarize rather extensively from the 
Sermon on the Mount. The most determinedly 
atheistic of the younger novelists of to-day 
cannot prevent their heroes from crying out, 
“Christ!” in moments of stress. 

Back of every man’s creed to-day, if he gives 
it honest investigation, back of every man’s 
creed, equally whether he is agnostic or whether 
he is believing, stands that silent, challenging 
figure, Jesus. Whatever philosophy you hold, 
you must either explain Jesus or explain him 
away. 


The Guidance of Rationalism 


Among the many opposing currents of opin- 
ion to-day, it is hard enough for any man to 
formulate his own course. A choice of guides 


10 CHAOS AND A CREED 


is difficult, for among believing people there 
appears to be more fighting than thinking, and 
among agnostics too much easy scorn, and 
everywhere too little of that austere adventure 
of the unseen which is faith. Obviously the first 
thing to do in investigating one’s own belief is 
to go straight to the gospel records and read 
them as if one had never read them before. 
Everybody owes Jesus that amount of honest 
attention. The four gospels have sealed him 
within a repository as secure as the tombs of 
the Pharaohs. In seeking to penetrate this 
repository, one may follow the manner of ap- 
proach either of the rationalists or of the theo- 
logians, but for myself, a plain man groping 
for that which to him is truth, I cannot fully 
accept the guidance of either. As I seek not 
controversy with anyone, but merely clarity 
for myself, I cannot follow the authority of 
rationalist science because, while the fact of 
evolution seems to me too obvious for question, 
I cannot unqualifiedly subscribe to the ape- 
and-accident theory. It accounts for human 
cruelty; it does not account for human kind- 
ness. It accounts for ugliness; it does not ac- 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 11 


count for beauty. It explains sensuality; it 
does not explain aspiration. To attribute a 
belief in God solely to the sublimation of the 
animal instinct of self-preservation is an as- 
sumption that for my own intellect is far too 
facile and too glib. To explain how the idea of 
God came to exist in the mind of man is not to 
explain how the idea of man came to exist in 
the mind of God, and for myself it is impos- 
sible to look at the course of evolution and not 
to believe there was an idea and a mind back 
of it. To say that creation has taken millions of 
years does not annul a creator, but establishes 
him. To assert that the long history of hu- 
manity from nothingness to sublimity is only 
one long-continued chapter of accidents is be- 
yond the farthest reach of my credulity. The 
existence of a mind in the making in no way 
contradicts for me, nor yet does it elucidate, 
the far more puzzling fact of a soul in the 
making. 

It is the dogmatism of rationalists that 
makes me distrust them. When they are not 
cocksure I welcome the many-sided illumina- 
tion they offer for the bewildering path of 


12 CHAOS AND A CREED 


faith. I cannot respect any man who thinks 
he has ascertained the final solution of the uni- 
verse, but I do respect H. G. Wells because 
he always expects to discover something new 
to-morrow. A further reason that makes me 
discredit the rationalists is that they appear to 
bury themselves in investigations of prehistoric 
or of protoplasmic man, and entirely to ignore 
certain staggering facts about the men imme- 
diately under their eyes. In this connection, 
another man I respect is Vernon Kellogg, who 
closes a keenly argued biological discussion by 
frankly admitting that he cannot explain on 
any purely protoplasmic basis the loveliness of 
his wife and little girl. 

For myself, it has become a primary law of 
all my thinking never to trust as a guide any 
man who sneers. Surely, in the face of so mar- 
velous a universe, scorn is an essentially unsci- 
entific bias of mind. Now while throughout 
this book I use the word faith as meaning faith 
in God, the word itself has, of course, a wider 
connotation. Faith, taken in its broadest sense, 
means any belief in the unproved so strong 
that a man will act on it—a conviction strong 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 13 


enough, for example, to make Columbus at- 
tempt the untried ocean, and the Wright 
brothers attempt the untried air. As I look 
back on the slow emergence of humanity from 
out the primordial ooze, it seems to me that 
faith, in its broadest sense of adventuring the 
unknown, has always been the supreme force 
for advance, and scorn of such faith always the 
greatest deterrent to progress. The first 
amceba to start an era of differentiation, and 
the first ape to start an era of walking upright, 
were brave individual adventurers pitted 
against the inertia of their fellows. Gazing 
back into farthest history, I cannot see that 
any men have advanced the race except those 
who acknowledged the possibilities of the un- 
proved and were ready to die for an hypothe- 
sis. The scorn, therefore, of any scientist for 
the churchman, of any churchman for the scien- 
tist, invalidates both equally as authorities, for 
it reveals too easy a complacence, and compla- 
cence, as we all know, is a betrayal of coward- 
ice, a manifestation of the inferiority complex. 
Complacence is always the refuge of those who 
would rather remain snug and shrunken than 


14 CHAOS AND A CREED 


adventure the intrepidity of growth. Revealed 
religion is a term occasioning much agitation, 
for the churchman fears a loss of personal pres- 
tige if he accepts religion as revealed to H. G. 
Wells, and the scientist fears a loss of per- 
sonal prestige if he accepts religion as revealed 
to Simon Peter. For myself, seeking among 
contemporary thinkers some help in investi- 
gating the accounts of Jesus, I cannot trust 
any man who is not himself fearlessly humble. 

As [I read current rationalist discussion of 
religious matters, I am often surprised at the 
actual ignorance and inaccuracy sometimes be- 
trayed. It appears sometimes as if the men 
who most despise the four tiny narratives of 
Jesus’s life, had never read them. They have 
read about them, they have heard about them, 
but one questions whether they have ever actu- 
ally sat down to read them for themselves with- 
out prejudice. Men who would be ashamed 
not to bring an open mind to the reading of 
Sophocles or of Horace, scorn to bring an open 
mind to the reading of Mark or Luke. In dis- 
cussing the four evangels, critics are too often 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 15 


guilty of inaccuracy, occasionally almost of 
illiteracy. 

An historian would be modest in his allusions 
to biology, a surgeon would be modest in his 
allusions to archeology, but few rationalists, 
whatever their own line of work, hesitate to 
exhibit their ignorance of the Bible or of bib- 
lical research. Now if some eminent electrician 
set out to write a book about Euripides, I 
should be interested in him not as an authority, 
but as a dilettante. If said electrician had ca- 
pacities of imagination and of fresh sympathy, 
I would hear him gladly, whether or not his 
opinions coincided with my own, but I cer- 
tainly would not regard him as an authority 
on either textual criticism or Athenian history. 
For those I should turn to accredited special- 
ists. As I read rationalist scientists or his- 
torians or philosophers to-day, they do not seem 
to me to exhibit enough first-hand knowledge 
of the gospel narrative to make them compe- 
tent to dismiss it so summarily as they do. I 
would gladly listen to whatever any scientist 
had to say of his personal response either to 
Euripides or to Jesus, but I could not possibly 


16 CHAOS AND A CREED 


believe that his equipment for the study of 
either could be exhaustive. 


The Guidance of the Church 


One turns from the guidance of the thinking 
men who do not accept Jesus to the guidance 
of the thinking men who do, but there are diffi- 
culties here also for any complete acquiescence. 
One is struck at once by an arresting fact—the 
theologians of to-day show a great deal more 
knowledge of what science is doing and think- 
ing than the scientists show of what theology is 
doing and thinking. I must make it clear that 
I am speaking not of fanatics, but of those 
illustrious Christian thinkers whom friends and 
foes alike would describe as gentlemen and 
scholars. It is a humorous evidence of a topsy- 
turvy period that to-day religious fanatics 
should be attacking science as science was in 
1870, and at the same time scientists should be 
attacking religion as religion was in 1870. But 
since 1870 the most thoughtful men in the lab- 
oratory and the most thoughtful men in the 
pulpit have done a good deal of growing. As 
a mere everyday layman, trying simply to 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 17 


be an honest and independent observer and 
reader, I have been forced to the conclusion 
that the exhaustive learning and brilliant logic 
of such men as Abbott, Wade, and Inge is 
practically unknown to the glib-worded ration- 
alists now prominent as historians, psycholo- 
gists, and philosophers, while, on the other 
hand, the most eminent churchmen show by a 
hundred explicit and implicit allusions their 
complete familiarity with the secular literature, 
the social movements, and the scientific discov- 
eries of their time. I cannot help feeling that 
such a man as Dean Inge, as an observer of the 
universe has within him an immensely greater 
intellectual content of varied knowledge, and 
an immensely keener intellectual acumen in 
making his deductions from that knowledge 
than any rationalist I have met. In briefer 
words, he seems to me to know more and to 
think about it harder than any materialist I 
have read. And yet Dean Inge is a Christian. 
Can anyone read such a book as Wade’s New 
Testament History, and not realize that here 
is a man putting every resource of brain and 
scholarship to the elucidation of some tiniest 


18 CHAOS AND A CREED 


preposition as being matter perhaps momen- 
tous for textual reading? Science itself gave 
him his unimpeachably fearless method, and 
shall science show itself blandly ignorant of 
his results? I cannot dismiss the austere inten- 
sive reasoning of such men as Inge or Wade 
for what is to me the more superficial logic of 
pure materialism. After all, in the bottom 
of our hearts, is there not always more dignity 
attaching to the man who says, “I believe in 
God,” than to the man who says, “I believe in 
matter”? This is because the first man is the 
more audacious, and, of all human attributes, 
audacity has the deepest and the most endur- 
ing effect on observers. It is precisely because 
of his audacity that Jesus still survives as a 
living enigma for every honest man to answer. 

In my approach to the brief biblical account 
of Jesus’s career, I find myself forced frankly 
to reject many of the human discrepancies and 
superstitions of the church, and yet its guidance 
seems to me safer than that of pure rational- 
ism, and this because the church seems to me 
truer to the principle governing all our evolu- 
tion, for, with all its inconsistencies, the church 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 19 


stands unalterably for the unproved as against 
the proved, the invisible as against the visible, 
the spiritual as against the material. It is easy 
enough for anyone to believe in what he can 
see and handle and eat and buy, but it requires 
a far higher mental development to be moti- 
vated by that which one cannot see or handle 
or eat or buy. Evolution is a long incline up 
from protoplasm toward personality, and be- 
cause I believe that all our development has 
depended on attempting the unproved, I be- 
lieve that the church is a better guide for one 
seeking to formulate a science of living, than 
rationalism, which proves too much. - 

It is a sad fact, however, that the churches 
also often prove too much. It is impossible for 
me to believe more than Jesus himself asks me 
to believe. But the churches go far beyond the 
demands of Jesus in creed, although they stop 
far short of his demands in conduct. The theo- 
logian insists on reading into the gospels the 
doctrines that have grown out of them, while 
a present-day thinker desires to go to that first 
record with an impartial mind, fearless to dis- 
cover what may be there, and equally fearless 


20 CHAOS AND A CREED 


to discard what may not be there. The institu- 
tions and creeds of the churches in trying to 
transmit Jesus to us have mingled with the life 
that was in him much of the death and decay 
always inherent in all ecclesiasticism. Without 
the church we should never have known Jesus, 
but within the churches do we always know 
him? A present-day reader of the Bible does 
not wish to be previously instructed to look for 
predestination or transubstantiation, or any 
other article of any creed. He wishes to enter 
the gate of the gospels as he might have en- 
tered any gate of old Jerusalem, without direc- 
tion from priest or scribe, in order to observe 
for himself this street preacher from Galilee. 
The impulse of the thinking Christian to-day 
is that of Nicodemus, to slip out and away 
from his church and listen for himself to words 
that may give him not so much a creed, as a 
Christ. 

One reason why I cannot completely accept 
the teaching of the church in regard to written 
Scripture, is the failure of the church to read 
the great unwritten scripture always open and 
always arresting, those twin books of the out- 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 21 


of-doors and of everyday humanity. Biblical 
scholarship in its study of the history of Jesus 
neglects too much the facts of human charac- 
ter and psychology, data scientifically as im- 
portant for all creed-making as is textual criti- 
cism. There is still in the church too much the 
attitude of the cloister, too little the attitude 
of the crowd. In its elucidation of the Bible 
there is still in theology too much midnight 
treatise, too little sunshine. If the churches 
would only admit that the sky is bigger than 
they are, that the commonest men and women 
along our daily routine are often as inspiring 
as any duly accredited preacher! I could listen 
more to the churchmen if they listened more 
to winds and sea and the great surge of hu- 
manity. Yet Jesus loved out-of-doors as heart- 
ily as any pagan, and Jesus loved to chat with 
any dirty, crafty Oriental beggar crouched like 
a spider in the parched grass at the edge of 
the highway. As I stand and look at all the 
churches and all the creeds of Christendom, it 
is impossible for me ever to forget that Jesus 
was an excommunicated man. He tried to stay 
in his church, but was forced out of it because 


22 CHAOS AND A CREED 


it cramped him. Jesus was greater than the 
temple and said so. In fact, it was for precisely 
this blasphemy that he was executed. Unim- 
peachably conservative in all essential matters 
of example, he is described as going on every 
Sabbath to the synagogue, but how can any- 
one ever forget how many times he went to the 
mountains to pray? 


The Attitude of a Thinking Christian 


The man who is impelled to make his own 
creed is also impelled to make it fit all the data 
spread before his vision, not alone the data to 
which the rationalists confine themselves, and 
not alone the data to which the religious con- 
fine themselves. In his approach to Scripture 
the thinking Christian must have a faith funda- 
mental enough to draw its deductions not only 
from certain material as once expressed in four 
brief Greek manuscripts, but also from that 
same material as for two thousand years it 
has affected human character. Through twenty 
centuries he must study the effect of Jesus not 
only on the men who have accepted him, but 
also on the men who have rejected him. The 


THE MANNER OF APPROACH 23 


thinking Christian must face eye to eye not 
alone the Jesus of yesterday, but the Jesus of 
to-day before he can win for himself from chaos 
a creed that will hold for to-morrow. 

As a guide, science is fallible because it 
refuses to interpret the secular in terms of the 
sacred, and the church is fallible because, too 
often, it refuses to interpret the sacred in terms 
of the secular. The distinction between the 
sacred and the secular is one that Jesus never 
recognized, any more than he ever recognized 
the distinction between the natural and the 
supernatural. For him the Sabbath was no 
holier than any other day, and every other day 
was just as holy as the Sabbath. For him the 
lilies rising from the dead every springtime at 
a mysterious summons, were neither more nor 
less miraculous than the rising from the dead 
of Lazarus at a mysterious summons. For 
myself it is exactly as much a strain on cre- 
dulity, or just as much a test of faith, to account 
for the Scripture of the lilies as to account for 
the Scripture of Lazarus. In both any honest 
man must observe an astounding control of 
death by life, and explanations of this life prin- 


24 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ciple by reference solely to chemistry or biology 
do not satisfy me any more than they would 
have satisfied Cleopas in his bewilderment and 
doubt before the events of the first Easter. For 
me, whether I am studying the Greek of the 
gospels or whether I am studying the colors 
of the woods, every word of the Bible is just as — 
much and just as little inspired as every leaf 
on every tree. If I am able to face and to 
accept all that is implied by the word April, I 
am able to face and to accept all that is implied 
by the word resurrection. Yet for me, as for 
Cleopas, the sole ultimate clue to all Scripture, 
whether living or written, is the personality 
of Jesus. 


Chapter II: The Historic 
Background 


Jesus's Background As a Clue to His Survival 


s I approach the actual reading of Jesus’s 
life, I must once again reiterate my stand- 
point. I write as a layman and an amateur. I 
may at any moment be guilty of as great inac- 
curacy as any of the skeptic writers with whom 
I have just found fault. My knowledge of the 
actual present findings of biblical scholarship 
corresponds to just such knowledge of elec- 
tricity, plumbing, lumber, construction, archi- 
tecture, as I should feel it necessary to have if 
I were about to put up a house. In order that 
my investment should be safe I should need 
some information as regards each of the 
sciences that contribute to the science of build- 
ing, but if I stopped to make my knowledge 
25 


26 CHAOS AND A CREED 


exhaustive, my home would go unbuilt. It will 
be perfectly possible for any specialist to find 
fault with any statement I may make with ref- 
erence to the many subjects that contribute to 
a study of the four gospels, for as to the archi- 
tecture of my belief, I am frankly ignorant in 
many a line of research that life allows me no 
time to follow. In a brief survey of the his- 
torical conditions that produced Jesus I here 
confine myself only to those that have helped to 
make my faith. It is not Jesus’s surroundings 
that have interested me, but rather his manner 
of handling them, as offering a clue to his 
enigmatic survival among us. I have not gone 
to the gospels for controversy; I have gone to 
them to get a creed I could live and die in. 
Every man who believes Jesus to be still a 
living force in the world must see the Jesus of 
history from a different angle. Every man 
among us who can make his own angle of ob- 
servation clear, first to himself and then to 
others, contributes something to a portrait too 
complex for any one man ever to pronounce 
complete. One of the strange things in the nar- 
ratives of the Resurrection is that everyone saw 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 27 


a different Jesus, one a gardener, another a 
fisherman, another a traveler. It is easy enough 
for anyone to seal Jesus into a grave, but every 
one of us who can report to-day, “This is the 
Jesus I have seen,” helps in the harder task of 
rolling away a stone. My accounting for my 
faith is only a way of saying, “This is the Jesus 
of history as I see him.” 


Its Elements of Death 


If one is going to give Jesus as much of 
respectful attention as one would give, say, to 
Napoleon, one must study his time and place 
before one studies the man. To understand the 
career of Napoleon, the Corsican, one would 
have to know something of the French history 
that preceded him and of the French country 
where he played his part. The parallelism be- 
tween Jesus and Napoleon is not without sug- 
gestiveness, for it was just as difficult for a 
Galilean to make himself felt in the Jerusalem 
of A.D. 30 as for a Corsican to make himself 
felt in the Paris of 1798. For their own time 
and people Corsica and Galilee were places too 
uncouth and illiterate for anything but laugh- 


28 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ter. If Jesus of Galilee had actually chosen to 
enter the world under the heaviest obstacles to 
leadership that any man could have, he could 
not have found a more obscure country, a more 
disparaged region, a more derided village, a 
more humble family than those which were 
actually his. It was a sublime acceptance of 
handicap for any man to rise from such ante- 
cedents to the influence that Jesus has had 
upon history. If the Pope in the Vatican were 
informed to-day that there was at this moment 
in a Zulu hut in Africa a baby destined to 
recreate religion, he could not be more as- 
tounded than Augustus in his imperial palace 
would have been if he had been informed that 
there was at that very moment running about 
the streets of a tiny hill town in Galilee a little 
Hebrew boy whose name would become famil- 
iar to thousands ignorant of even the existence 
of Cesar. 

If Jesus had actually chosen his date of en- 
trance, he could not have chosen one when, in 
all history, his own proud nation was so hope- 
lessly downtrodden. The Romans held a fiery 
race in as tight a grip as the Germans once 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND _29 


held Belgium, only their grip was permanent, 
so that for the Jews craft and compromise were 
the only method of dealing. ‘The Romans de- 
spised religion too much to interfere with it, 
except when fanatics threatened an insurrec- 
tion. The Jews were permitted the semblance 
of kings, but these were of alien race, and all 
true Jews hated the Herods, those sycophants 
of the foreign governors. Jesus was a live man 
and a live patriot born into a dead nation. 
Leadership without shedding blood was a stag- 
gering feat to accomplish. 

If Jesus had actually selected those circum- 
stances when of all times and places it would 
have been hardest for any vital faith to make 
headway, he could not have found a more un- 
promising spot than the Jerusalem of the 
scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees. Strange 
that history, in spite of all its power to bury 
living truth, should have been able to falsify 
Jesus into the semblance of a meek man, when 
much of his teaching was shouted in the teeth 
of a mob brandishing stones and howling for 
his life! Abnormally restricted as was the Jew- 
ish nation, all its normal national expression, 


30 CHAOS AND A CREED 


literary, artistic, political, legal, turned into 
its church as the sole outlet permitted to its 
energies, so that not in all history can there be 
discovered a time when a purely spiritual reli- 
gion had become so incrusted with materialism. 
The concise and simple law of Moses had be- 
come swollen beyond recognition by a great 
body of rabbinical addenda and casuistry, or- 
ally transmitted. From northernmost Galilee 
to southernmost Judea there were everywhere 
synagogue schools, so that no Jewish boy was 
an illiterate; but these schools stultified young 
minds by the rote learning of laws made by 
generation after generation of lawmakers. 
Many laws necessitated, exactly as in the 
United States to-day, many lawyers, the 
scribes. Many laws necessitated also the exist- 
ence of a class who could give all their time to 
obeying these laws—the Pharisees, the nation- 
alists of their period. While scribes and Phari- 
sees might rise to power from any social 
stratum, the actual political authority was in 
the hands of the worldly, cynical Sadducees, 
the rich hereditary aristocrats, always sympa- 
thetic with whatever government was in con- 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND | 31 


trol, and always supplying from its own ranks 
that chief of Jewish officials, the high priest. 
In the church of Jesus’s day, conduct and char- 
acter were nothing; keeping laws and observ- 
ances was everything. Religion was wholly de- 
void of any vitalizing humility. The scribe was 
atrophied with the pride of learning, the Phari- 
see was atrophied with the pride of righteous- 
ness, the Sadducee was atrophied with the pride 
of politics. It is almost impossible for us, as 
we gaze at the formalism and hypocrisy and 
commercialism that swathed the forgotten 
piety of Abraham as if they had been grave 
clothes, to understand the bravery of Jesus 
when he dared to summon again to life the 
buried corpse of Jewish faith. 


Its Elements of Life 


Jesus found a dying nation and a dying 
creed, and he adventured a daring method of 
recreation, fearlessly excising the elements of 
decay and fearlessly remotiving the elements 
of life. Quite apart from the three agencies, 
law, church, politics, that governed Jewish 
thought, there still existed in Palestine, and 


32 CHAOS AND A CREED 


especially in Galilee, those two elements with- 
out which no country can have a live religion— 
namely, God and the people. Dying of its own 
exclusiveness, the church had created a god 
in its own image, making him a fetish with a 
noble name but with a bloodthirsty nature. As 
for the people, the scribes and Pharisees, ex- 
cept when they needed mob sanction of their 
own prerogatives, as in the legalized lynching 
of Jesus, cheerfully relegated the people to 
limbo—“This people who knoweth not the law 
is accursed.” No member of the toiling, un- 
sanctified masses was permitted entrance to a 
Pharisee’s house, but the masses might, if they 
liked, stand and look on while he prayed. Jesus 
came to a dying religion, but he brought back 
to it those two elements of vigor, God and the 
people, for he succeeded in renaming the god 
of sacrifice, “Father,” and to the people he 
preached belief in themselves. It was impos- 
sible for Jesus and the Pharisees of his day 
to exist side by side in the Jewish church, and 
so, in a panic of fear for its own prestige, his 
own church crucified him. It was impossible 
for Jesus and the scribes of his day to exist 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ~— 33 


side by side in the field of intellect, and so, to 
prove to themselves their own dignity, these in- 
tellectuals laughed at him. It was impossible 
for Jesus and the Sadducees of his day to 
exist side by side in the Jewish system of gov- 
ernment; it was imperative for national secu- 
rity, so argued those Jewish politicians, that the 
Golden Rule be made a capital offense. 


To me the chief mystery set before my faith 
in the man Jesus is his faith in men. Material- 
ists appear to be staggered by those narratives 
that tell how Jesus put life into dead bodies, 
but they do not appear to be at all staggered 
by those narratives that tell how he put life into 
dead minds. This is precisely the miracle he 
performed upon the dead Palestine of his day. 
His method was to look for any seeds of life 
that might be anywhere in the arid soil and 
release them to growth. For this method the 
circumstances of his own social class and en- 
vironment peculiarly equipped him. His hum- 
ble family and his despised countryside were 
little touched by the effete influences of priest- 
craft and of contemporary politics. He grew 


34 CHAOS AND A CREED 


up among the people, one of them in blood, 
possessing from the first all the vigor of their 
point of view. His growth was never crippled 
by being bent to an aristocratic attitude. For 
the formation of a personality, he had all the 
advantages of poverty and obscurity. He was 
free to be a forceful human being because from 
the first there was no blight upon him of riches 
or of noble birth to separate him from his fel- 
lows and cheat him of the heritage of varied 
contacts, and of listening to the wisdom of 
unlettered minds. Not being born to wealth or 
to social prominence, he could grow to a dy- 
namic manhood, because he was never dwarfed, 
as an aristocratic child must always be, by con- 
stant fear, by the incessant menace of posses- 
sions that may be lost. ‘The high-born child 
rarely escapes the conviction that his very iden- 
tity is bound up with his possessions, that with- 
out money or social superiority he cannot be 
himself. Jesus grew up with that self-depend- 
ence which vitalized him and enabled him to 
vitalize others. His early surroundings com- 
pose one element in that personal magnetism 
which makes him unique in history. 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND — 35 


Jesus was rustic, not urban, which means 
that while his humble birth enriched him by 
giving him the people’s point of view, his coun- 
try surroundings prevented his having too 
much the people’s point of view. He could not 
be dominated by the mind of the herd, because 
his whole being was clarified by living with the 
hills. In every dilemma of his career you find 
him climbing the nearest height, all alone, to 
find the explanation. No proletarian Utopia 
can ever have the vitality of that social order 
Jesus died to inaugurate, because the prole- 
tariat itself is a city product. Its horizons are 
walled in and it formulates a social structure 
founded wholly on the nature of men and re- 
ceiving no illumination from the nature of 
trees. If Jesus had been brought up in some 
swarming, reeking alley of Jerusalem, he 
would doubtless have attained to all his burn- 
ing sympathy for men, but he could not have 
had that life-giving poise granted only to a 
man who constantly corrects his knowledge of 
humanity by comparing it with his knowledge 
of the growth-laws of mustard seeds and wheat. 


36 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Galilee, that beautiful fertile northern strip 
of Palestine, had all the vitality of a province 
scorned by the priests and neglected by the 
politicians of fashionable Jerusalem. Simple, 
self-respecting families, stanch to the old vig- 
orous Judaism, were common in Galilee. A 
boy memorizing Jewish Scripture in the syna- 
gogue schools of Nazareth or Bethsaida or Ca- 
pernaum would have learned the Law, but 
rather the Law of Moses than that of the rab- 
bis, nor, as is evidenced by the quickness of 
Jesus’s quotations, would a Galilean boy have 
learned only the Law, but also other portions 
of Old Testament Scripture, for God as rev- 
erenced in Galilee was not alone the God of 
Moses, the lawgiver, but of Isaiah, the prophet, 
and of David, the singer. The stalwart fisher- 
men by the shining waters of Gennesaret could 
far ,more readily than the turbaned crafty 
Pharisees of Jerusalem accept the new truth 
that their ancient Jehovah was their own 
present father. 

While Judea was the center of an ingrowing 
nationalism and a fanatic ecclesiasticism, Gali- 
lee was cosmopolitan. Always a thoroughfare 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND = 387 


of trade between east and west, Galilee, as far 
back as Isaiah, was called “Galilee of the na- 
tions.” There were so many Greeks in Galilee 
that the whole region was bi-lingual, everyone 
speaking both Greek and the Hebrew patois 
Aramaic. Everywhere Helenes and Hebrews 
were house neighbors, the first being the busi- 
ness men of the community, the second the 
farmers and craftsmen. The Galileans, also, 
rubbed elbows with nations other than the Hel- 
lenic—all the tribes of Syria, all the many- 
hued strangers moving over those provincial 
highways in the unceasing caravans that 
chained together east and west. A place where 
many races met in mutually illuminating con- 
tact, Galilee was a promising field for the 
germinating of a world religion. 

Yet, viewed from another aspect, Galilee 
was the seat of the most violent chauvinism of 
its time. Contact with pagan merchantmen 
developed breadth of sympathy in some char- 
acters, but in more it intensified nationalistic 
feeling. In proportion as this feeling caused 
the Jews to preserve their creed intact against 
polytheism, it was good; in proportion as it 


38 CHAOS AND A CREED 


caused them to hate their neighbors, it was bad. 
The Galileans were impetuous, not crafty. 
While the Jews of Jerusalem were ready to 
compromise with the Romans and to satisfy 
their own nationalism with elaborate ritual and 
hair-splitting observance, the Galileans were 
ready at any moment to flame into insurrec- 
tion against the foreign despot and re-establish 
their old Jewish supremacy. They looked 
always for a leader to direct this ambition. 
Jesus himself possessed the Galilean tempera- 
ment. It was a Galilean who, single-handed, 
scourged the host of money-changers from the 
temple. Within himself Jesus had learned to 
curb and redirect his native vehemence before 
he tried to curb and redirect it in his country- 
men. For his use their fire was perilous, but 
promising. Only one of the twelve men Jesus 
chose to spread his teaching was not from Gali- 
lee, but from Judea, Judas Iscariot. Jesus rec- 
ognized all the dangers in Galilean national- 
ism, but dared to trust its vitality. He took it 
and endeavored to cleanse it of its murderous 
violence. He took patriotism with all its vigor, 
and tried to turn it from exacting the service 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 39 


of other peoples to offering service to all the 
world. He took that old name, “Galilee of the 
nations,’ and made it new. 


Jesus, who always recognized all that was 
vital and rejected all that was moribund in all 
tradition, readily availed himself of the tradi- 
tional dignity of the prophet. Always at inter- 
vals in Jewish history there had appeared sud- 
denly out of the desert mystery, men of power, 
austere, visioned, incorruptible. These men 
were fearless and electric, rebuking degenerate 
kings and priests and achieving for a time the 
resurrection of religion. Jesus appreciated the 
popular respect for the prophet, with all its 
live implications, and appropriated the proph- 
et’s role to fit his own destiny. 

Jesus employed for his own purposes not 
only the prophet’s role, but actual prophecy. 
The Jews were unique in their period, because, 
with all their degradation, they were an ex- 
pectant race, while the races that ruled them, 
with all their power, were despairing. ‘The 
gods of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and 
Rome, were dead. Cynical and disillusioned, 


40 CHAOS AND A CREED 


the proud Roman world fell so low that it wor- 
shiped the emperor. But the Jews, in chains 
to Rome, still believed in their own restoration. 
Every Jewish boy knew by heart the proph- 
ecies of the hero to come, who should make 
Israel again supreme as in the time of David. 
These prophecies ranged in value from the 
beautiful and spiritual to the incoherent and 
gross, but they were all instinct with hope. 
Crude Galilee, mongrel Samaria, subtle Judea, 
all alike believed in a great captain who should 
be born to their nation. They spoke of him 
popularly as the Anointed, the king set apart 
by the ceremony of oil poured from a chrism; 
they called this hypothetical national hero the 
Christ. The conception of the Christ differed 
according to class and individual, but always it 
was a conception of restored prestige, always 
it meant the striking off of the shackles of fear 
from a proud nation enslaved. Jesus took this 
popular conception of the Christ with all its 
vital promise, and endeavored to transform it 
into a new life, striving to divert the expecta- 
tion from physical to spiritual supremacy. The 
effort showed a madman’s confidence in men, 


THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 41 


and for it Jesus died. Yet to what degree he 
succeeded in regenerating an ancient idea can 
be seen by the measureless difference of mean- 
ing with which the Jews of his day used, and 
with which we of to-day use, the word Christ. 


Summary: Jesus’s Relation to His 
Background 


This examination of the historical conditions 
surrounding Jesus is frankly cursory, unschol- 
arly, and superficial, but some such survey is 
imperative, for any man who wishes to examine 
as independently as possible the actual records 
of Jesus. For myself, as I look at Jesus 
against the background of his own era, he 
seems to me the greatest example in history 
of personal dynamic. I know of no other char- 
acter whose life purpose faced such handicap. 
The difficulties set before Jesus explain his 
failure; the advantages he used do not explain 
his success, unless you allow for an absolutely 
unique initiative in the employment of them. 
Jesus stands out in history as the most icono- 
clastic destroyer of all that is decadent, and the 
most daring regenerator of all that is vital, 


42 CHAOS AND A CREED 


for the development of human individuality. 
For myself, without a knowledge of his times 
I find Jesus inexplicable; with a knowledge of 
his times I find him even more inexplicable, for 
nothing solves for me the puzzling fact that an 
obscure young Jewish carpenter succeeded in 
so impressing himself upon history as to set 
his name upon a new era, so that to-day, in 
the very same breath with which we announce 
that science has once more sealed Jesus into 
a tomb, we label every new scientific discovery 
with the date of his birth. 


Chapter IV: The Four Biographies 
of Jesus 


External Evidence 


pers mutilated puzzling little pamphlet 
biographies, facsimiles of old Greek 
manuscripts, give all that we know of the man 
who has had the most far-reaching influence 
in all time. I use the word far-reaching advis- 
edly, for I know the statistics of the number 
of Buddhists, Confucians, and Mohammedans 
alive to-day, but I know of no one who is to-day 
throwing stones at Buddha, Confucius, or Mo- 
hammed. It is only a live man that people 
stone, and only because they are afraid of him. 
The four gospels are alike in being the record 
of an effort to destroy and bury from notice a 
living man. All four end with a broken, in- 
complete account of his return from the grave. 
Two of them give the narrative of this man’s 
43 


AA CHAOS AND A CREED 


birth. ‘Two of them, the earliest and the latest, 
confine themselves to his public career, a career 
possibly three years long, possibly not more 
than half that. No one of them gives the slight- 
est clue to one mysterious fact—how did a man 
possessing such force that by the sheer power 
of his personality he changed the whole course 
of human thought, how did such a man keep 
that power suppressed, unknown to even those 
nearest him, for thirty years? For myself, the 
untold story of Jesus’s long years of obscurity 
is as challenging as anything the gospels tell 
of his brief months of eminence. In trying 
to fathom his strange effect on present-day 
thought, I feel that his possible motive for his 
long concealment reveals a most significant ele- 
ment in his influence. 

Although for myself the internal evidence 
of the gospels is the strongest argument for 
their truth, there is much that is most sug- 
gestive for the thinking Christian in the opin- 
ions and hypotheses of present-day biblical 
scholarship. Risking always a layman’s inac- 
curacy, I gather that the most scientific and 
most recent scriptural research tends to place 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 45 


the composition of the gospels nearer and 
nearer to the events they chronicle. This seems 
to be the latest opinion of specialists too emi- 
nent and too scholarly to be lightly set aside, 
yet it is opinion generally ignored by rational- 
ist writers of the day, who always appear to 
presuppose a long period of wonder-tale and 
folk-lore as elapsing between Jesus’s death 
and the first accounts of it. The synoptics in 
their chronological order, Mark, Matthew, 
Luke, were actually written from A.D. 60 to 
80. Jesus was executed, according to our dat- 
ing, in A.D. 33. Lincoln was assassinated in 
1865. Suppose there had come into existence 
between the years 1890 and 1910 three biog- 
raphies of Lincoln so satisfactory to the people 
who must actually have known him that all 
other accounts were spontaneously rejected 
and these three given a universal acceptance, 
these three biographies of Lincoln would have 
corresponded exactly to the first three biog- 
raphies of Jesus. 

A small but most careful group of present- 
day investigators in textual criticism is at this 
very moment inclining to the hypothesis of an 


46 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Aramaic original—possibly to be discovered at 
any time by archeologists—from which all 
three synoptics borrow. Such an Aramaic 
original, it is thought, may have existed within 
a decade of Jesus’s death, and may itself have 
been the expansion of actual written notes 
taken by some of the disciples. It appears to 
be an undisputed fact that the first three nar- 
ratives were written within a comparatively 
short time after Jesus’s execution, yet even so, 
they were not written in their surviving shape 
until the preaching and the reporting of eye- 
witnesses were becoming impossible through 
persecution and martyrdom. ‘The three syn- 
optic gospels are merely the writing down for 
transmission of words that Christian mission- 
aries had previously been speaking for twenty- 
five years. Jesus had not been in the grave two 
months before the words that he said and the 
deeds that he did were being broadcasted 
throughout the pagan world through the un- 
derground agencies of the always potent hum- 
ble. ‘Two months is a very brief period for in- 
ventions and inaccuracies to arise. 

While the most authoritative research of to- 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 47 


day tends to place the gospel narrative closer 
and closer fo its events, still there was, of 
course, an important intervening period, how- 
ever brief, when all the transmission was oral. 
Just here we should be on our guard against 
the proud modern fallacy of endowing the 
sturdy ancients with our own incapacities. The 
fact that a college boy of to-day could not pos- 
sibly learn by heart the hour-long discourses 
of some teacher does not disprove the fact that 
a young Galilean of the year A.D. 80 could 
easily have done so. A Galilean fisher-boy 
might even have remembered such discourses 
for seventy years or more. We moderns always 
minimize the exactness with which in earlier 
days history and literature were handed down 
by word of mouth. 

We depend so completely on our eyes that 
our ears have atrophied. But before the in- 
vention of printing, ears were more to be de- 
pended on than eyes. Every Galilean disciple 
had been as carefully trained in verbal memory 
and accuracy as Jesus himself had been taught 
in the synagogue school at Nazareth the Scrip- 
ture that he quotes so readily. Every fisherman 


48 CHAOS AND A CREED 


friend of Jesus was as well equipped to remem- 
ber and quote the New ‘Testament message as 
Jesus, the carpenter, was equipped to remem- 
ber and quote the Old Testament message. 
The words of Jesus later became subject to 
all the accidents of manuscript, papyrus, vel- 
lum, ink, copying, translation, but the mutila- 
tions and imperfections are not to be attributed 
to his disciples’ memories—those were true and 
living parchment. 

Before entering the gospels to discover their 
intrinsic evidence, one must note another ex- 
ternal fact of importance—namely, the antiq- 
uity of the existing manuscripts. Not only is 
the gospel account almost contemporaneous 
with the life of Jesus, but the actual parchment 
on which that account is written is hundreds of 
years older than the manuscripts we possess of 
Greek and Latin literature. Now I believe 
there was a real pupil of Socrates named Plato 
who wrote an account of his teacher’s life and 
discourses. I also believe there was a real pupil 
of Jesus named John who wrote an account of 
his teacher’s life and discourses, but the manu- 
script responsible for my belief in Jesus and 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 49 


his John is six centuries older than the manu- 


script responsible for my belief in Socrates and 
his Plato. 


Internal Evidence, the Incongruities 


So far, this approach to the gospels has 
been under the guidance of scholars, but faith 
is far too vital a need to be made dependent 
on any scholar’s learning, however erudite. 
Not what other people say about the man in 
the records, nor what they say about the rec- 
ords themselves, but what the man in that 
ancient narrative says to each one of us, is 
the sole issue before anyone who would make 
lucid to his own mind the foundations of his 
belief. 

If many people fail to discover the Jesus of 
the gospels for the simple reason that they are 
not familiar with them, far more fail to dis- 
cover him because they are too familiar with 
them. One might conceive the books of the 
world as tombs in a splendid cemetery, sur- 
viving in the heart of a bustling city. The tomb 
of Jesus is a moss-grown mausoleum. Many 
persons would pass it by, incapable of believ- 


50 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ing that a modern scientific mind could find 
anything of interest in a spot so time-worn. 
Many others, questioned, would answer: “The 
tomb of Jesus? Why, yes, of course we know it 
well, every block of it, inside and out; been 
going up and down past it to business these two 
thousand years!” 

There are few things harder than to enter, 
as if one had never seen them before, the four 
little moss-grown books that entomb Jesus. 
Yet to me it seems just as legitimate to use 
imagination in studying these books as to use 
imagination in advertising a dentifrice or in 
inventing a gas bomb. 

As I try to enter the gospels with that fresh 
imagination which I should accord, as a mere 
principle of critical integrity, to a newly dis- 
covered play by Sophocles, I find these four 
biographies of Jesus absolutely unique in my 
knowledge of literature. To dismiss them with 
scorn is so easy that I wonder anyone tries to. 
Of course they are credulous, of course they 
are inconsistent, of course they are naive as 
the mind of a new-born baby. They are broken 
off here, they are repetitions there. I am speak- 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 51 


ing now to my agnostic friends who are genu- 
inely nonplused that any thinking man should 
be so superstitious as to credit the New Testa- 
ment narrative. To those friends I say, I do 
not ask that you try to share my convictions, 
but merely that you try to understand them. 

I cannot tell whether it is the inconsistencies 
of the gospels that more convince me or their 
consistencies. At least I find the latter im- 
measurably more impressive. Suppose incident 
had dovetailed into incident with mathematical 
nicety, what would have been surer proof of 
falsehood than such obvious collusion? It 
seems generally admitted that the gospels 
were written by four different men at four dif- 
ferent dates, and possibly at four different 
places. Therefore, how account for their sin- 
gular harmony of impression? The discrepan- 
cies of the gospels are concerned with incidents 
and with sequence of incidents. Their remark- 
able accord is in the matter of the teaching they 
present and the portraits they paint. ‘The dy- 
namic of that teaching and the truth of those 
portraits furnish for faith material more ar- 
resting and more challenging than a narrative 


52 CHAOS AND A CREED 


that itself stands absolutely apart from all 
other written chronicle. The ordinary man, 
reading for himself the first four books of the 
New Testament, should bring to them, it goes 
without saying, the same general knowledge of 
the development of history and of literature 
that he would employ in any other critical ad- 
venture. The sacred books of the first century 
are worthy of as respectful handling as the 
secular. It is not self-respecting to study Juve- 
nal with sympathy, but to study John with 
contempt. 


As one views the incongruities of the four- 
fold biography of Jesus, one should surely have 
sufficient intelligence to step back two thou- 
sand years before exacting of Matthew, Mark, 
Luke, and John either the historical or the liter- 
ary consciousness characteristic of the twen- 
tieth century. Historical accuracy, as we know 
it, did not exist anywhere in the world at the 
time of Jesus, and least of all in Palestine. 
History as an inexorable evolutional process 
always coercing all the actions and the charac- 
teristics of men to the type of their own decade, 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 53 


is a very recent idea. The Jews of Jesus’s day 
recognized no incongruity in expecting an ob- 
scure unlettered carpenter to repeat in the era 
of the Roman Empire the exploits of David, 
the shepherd-king of Judea. Yesterday, to- 
day, and forever were mingled in the Jewish 
mind of that time in a way most difficult for 
us to appreciate. And yet for us to demand of 
Galilean provincials our own sense of historical 
perspective is to be ourselves curiously pro- 
vincial in attitude, curiously deficient in the 
first requisite of critical equipment. 

We undervalue the enormous advantage of 
those practical aids to accuracy taken for 
granted to-day. ‘'wenty centuries ago, chro- 
nology and geography hardly existed. Luke, 
who of all the four comes nearest the require- 
ments of a modern biographer, has a hard 
enough time with his dates—during the rule 
of this or that king or tetrarch or governor, this 
in his clumsy, yet unavoidable method of 
placing momentous occurrences. Works of 
reference were either altogether lacking or alto- 
gether unavailable. The humble biographers of 
Jesus, and their descendant copyists, could 


54 CHAOS AND A CREED 


hardly have traveled to Athens or Alexandria 
to find a library, and if they had, who would 
have showed them a path among masses of 
uncatalogued manuscripts? The historians of 
Jesus have given the world a deathless narra- 
tive, but under such unfavorable conditions of 
period and of place as to make not its inade- 
quacy, but its adequacy, an enigma. 

The inaccuracies of the evangel that has 
come down to us must of course be ascribed 
not only to the faults of its original composi- 
tion, but to all the varied fortune due to copy- 
ing and handling. Writing material more frag- 
ile than papyrus can hardly be conceived. 
Mark’s account of the Resurrection breaks off 
with the breaking of the pulp-sheet on which 
it was inscribed. Divine words may lie beneath 
the erasures on any parchment. Not that the 
account has come to us probably marred and 
elliptic, but that through all the accidents of 
the long centuries it has come to us at all, and 
come shining and strange and startling, is the 
marvel. 

One should not forget, too, that, frail as 
was papyrus, fallible as was parchment, uncer- 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 55 


tain as were stylus and quill and the copyist’s 
attention, all these means to the transmission 
and spreading of Jesus’s influence were ex- 
pensive, and the earliest church and the earliest 
missionaries were penniless. In these later 
days of campaigning and publicity, it is inter- 
esting to note that the message that has gone 
farthest in history was propagated not by 
means of money, but by means of something 
else more potent. Possibly one might attribute 
both the imperfections and the perfection of the 
gospel to the fact that it is a poor man’s story. 

The pitiful brevity of the gospel records, in 
which obviously much of intense interest is 
omitted, is largely due to a simple contempo- 
rary cause—they were written by men in a des- 
perate hurry to get their message before the 
world in time to save the werld. The early 
church expected the second coming of Jesus 
at any day or hour, certainly within the life- 
time of the men who had known him. This 
belief helped to give those first missionaries 
the courage necessary to spread their faith. 
Jesus’s message was first published entirely 
through the extemporaneous preaching of the 


56 CHAOS AND A CREED 


facts of his life. In that brief, arrested career 
those first preachers found that certain inci- 
dents and discourses met with readier response 
than others, and so employed them over and 
over and finally committed them to writing, 
that this form might be preserved and carried 
about by missionaries as rapidly as possible 
before the end should come. Only one of the 
gospels is written by a man who had lived long 
enough to know that the end was not soon, and 
also that the facts given in the three previous 
accounts needed supplementing and interpret- 
ing. John is the only one of the evangelists 
who writes with all eternity at his elbow. 

To plead that the gospels are in any sense 
adequate or exact histories would be to pick 
them out of their convincing historical setting 
and set them down at least sixteen hundred 
years later, but it is conceivable that the subtle 
scientific terms and methods by which we ex- 
plain away Jesus are as inadequate to deal with 
an enigmatic personage as the naive ignorance 
and the quaint language in which his contem- 
poraries explained him. It is conceivable that 
the method and the words of a present-day 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 57 


rationalist, writing the history of Jesus, will 
seem just as crude and naive to the minds of 
the year A.D. 4000 as the method and the 
words of the evangelists seem to us to-day. It 
is possible that it will always be difficult for 
any historian, restricted to the mental fashions 
of his own decade, ever to write the life of a 
timeless character. 


First-century Palestine was as deficient in 
literary consciousness as in historical. To 
ascribe to the gospels any intentional false- 
hood or invention is to be a most disingenuous 
critic, for it is to attribute to the crude and 
ignorant men to whom Jesus first intrusted his 
doctrines, the careful artifice, the elaborate 
research, the subtle artistic skill that belong 
only to the modern mind. In thet age and until 
far into later times, individual authorship was 
nothing. A narrator could borrow or discard 
because all that mattered to writer or to reader 
was the thing written. While we must live in 
a period obsessed by personal and irrelevant 
detail, the evangelists had the advantage of 
concentrating merely on their evangel. Every 


58 CHAOS AND A CREED 


time I read the gospels I am more profoundly 
impressed by the utter guilelessness of the 
writers. Their minds seem transparent as 
spring water. All the auditors of Jesus as ex- 
hibited so naively—Pharisees, apostles, beg- 
gars, scribes—seem incapable of understanding 
his simplest words, or imagining his most ob- 
vious motives, or anticipating his most natural 
acts. People who were incapable of under- 
standing the actual Jesus when he was alive, 
could hardly have become capable of inventing 
after he was dead a Jesus different from the 
Jesus they had known. Imagination is not 
made overnight. When Jesus chose his first 
pupils from among the dull he showed long 
psychological foresight into the doubts of the 
modern and clever. 

The evangelists convince me because they 
don’t try to. As I read them, the gospels ap- 
pear to me to be composed not to proselyte, 
but to transmit—to be addressed, that is, by 
men convinced to other men convinced. The 
only reason the record was written at all was 
for convenience in distribution. Both the term 
and the fact of literary art were conceptions 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 59 


impossible to the biographers of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. As I read, I feel as if I were eavesdrop- 
ping; upon accuracy, listening to the white-hot 
words of fishermen still shaken by an astound- 
ing contact. 


Internal Evidence, the Harmony 


The discrepancies of the gospels seem to me 
the strongest witness to their authenticity, if 
they were what they purport to be, four nar- 
ratives from out first-century Palestine. But 
always to me the harmony of the gospels is 
more amazing than any discrepancy. Four dif- 
ferent men report words utterly unparalleled 
in the knowledge of any of them. These men 
were letter-perfect in rabbinical doctrine. 
They neither knew nor conceived any other 
form of righteousness, but against the teach- 
ings of the scribes the words of Jesus flame 
with iconoclasm. Four different hands record 
these words, four different minds, staggered by 
their novelty and their daring, might have mis- 
construed their meaning. Yet from the first 
verse of Matthew to the last verse of John, the 
doctrine Jesus taught stands forth as one, as 


60 CHAOS AND A CREED 


indivisible to the four minds that recorded it 
as it was inconceivable by any one of them. 
Four brief narratives reveal with uttermost 
sincerity four men struggling to tell the story 
of a man utterly unprecedented in the experi- 
ence or the knowledge of his contemporaries. 
Each of these narratives presents a different 
aspect of this mysterious personage, and yet, 
after one has read all four, he stands forth as 
perfectly consistent. This is an amazing fact. 
But the portrait of Jesus is not the only por- 
trait to rise up before us, an harmonious entity. 
All the men and women that appear, all vivid 
as life itself, whether described by Matthew, 
Mark, Luke, or John, are always perfectly in 
character. If four different men at four dif- 
ferent dates had taken the plot of “Hamlet,” 
and written a play upon it, is it conceivable 
that a modern student, reading the four plays, 
would afterward have in his mind one single 
harmonious conception, rather than four di- 
verse conceptions, of the characters of Polo- 
nius, Lertius, Gertrude, Ophelia? There are 
in the gospels disparities so obvious that fab- 
rication would never have permitted them to 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 61 


exist, but these disparities have to do with mere 
events and mere order of events. On the other 
hand, the teaching that the gospels inculcate, 
and the portraits they draw, are so consistent 
that for my own mind the sole explanation is 
that all four records have reference to the same 
actual words and the same actual people. 


The Argument from the Gospel of John 


I have written so far of the four evangelists 
as if all four, though individual, stood on an 
equality, but for two thousand years the world 
has grouped three of the gospels together and 
set one of them apart. It has been as hard for 
John’s book to gain admittance to the New 
Testament as it is for John’s master to gain 
admittance to our lives. Yet John’s book and 
John’s friend stand as inescapavle facts far 
easier to deny than to account for. I shall 
never know how it is possible for anyone to 
read the gospel of John through from first 
word to last and not believe it written by that 
man who, of all men having names known to 
history, knew Jesus best in life, and thought 
about him most and longest after his cruci- 


62 CHAOS AND A CREED 


fixion. I cannot believe that any man except 
one recreated by Jesus could have created the 
book of John. This is deduction from the in- 
ternal authority of the fourth gospel, but there 
is external evidence, too. This gospel is abso- 
lutely known to have been in general use by 
the Christian church before the year A.D. 160 
and probably far earlier. Its actual authorship 
is generally dated at A.D. 100. Now the most 
cursory knowledge of literary history and 
equipment and ability would surely admit that 
there was not living anywhere in the world 
prior to 160, or for a thousand years after, 
anyone capable of the research into Jewish law 
and custom and geography, or capable of 
the imaginative insight into alien modes of 
thought, or endowed with the spiritual original- 
ity necessary to write the book of John, except 
a man who had been an eye-witness of his own 
narrative. We moderns sometimes exhibit a 
grotesque self-flattery, for only moderns could 
believe that any man could have invented the 
God-man of John. Strange that those among 
us to-day who most vociferously assert the 
bestiality of human nature, quite as confidently 


THE FOUR BIOGRAPHIES OF JESUS 63 
ascribe to human invention the sublimity of 
the Book of John. As I grope for the founda- 
tions of my faith, I cannot, as an honest 
thinker, ever neglect, while I weigh the testi- 
mony of written Scripture, the testimony of 
unwritten scripture spread all around me in 
terms of real people and capacities. From 
nothing I have ever read or observed of the 
workings of the human mind, can I believe that 
it could ever have spontaneously produced the 
gospel of John. For myself, I can never 
escape the fact of sublimity merely by denying 
it. Reasons for disregarding the fourth evangel 
are obvious. Its Jesus is too disconcerting for 
acceptance. No one can ever stand face to face 
with the portrait of Jesus painted by John 
and ever again be conceited, and conceit is the 
only protection Caliban, emergent, has against 
the blazing tenderness of God. Absurd as it 
may seem for me to pit my brain against Doc- 
tor Crile and Harvey Robinson and Bertrand 
Russell and Sigismund Freud and a thousand 
other rationalists as sincere, I say to them and 
to every agnostic friend of mine, it is impos- 


64 CHAOS AND A CREED 


sible for my intelligence to believe that the 
gospel according to John is merely the out- 
come of the instinct of self-preservation as 
expressed by an animal who was quite recently 
an amceba. 


Chapter V: Old Words and 
Old Meanings - 


Spiritual vs. Literal Inspiration 


HE people who flash forth from the pages 

of written Scripture are more alive and 
instant to our comprehension than are the 
words by which they are transmitted to us. One 
of the most effective methods of burying Jesus 
is to call him obsolete, but the only thing about 
Jesus that is obsolete is the language in which 
his history has come down to us, A man is not 
dead just because his tomb has been built of 
dead stones. Jesus, whose character utterly 
transcended its contemporary setting, still ac- 
cepted every obstacle of that setting. He was 
forced to express new ideas in old terms; not 
until those new ideas had transformed men’s 
thoughts could new terms be employed. Jesus 
had before him the desperate hazard of intrust- 

65 


66 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ing a teaching vitally new to minds cramped 
by contemporary Pharisaism and at times 
almost ludicrously puzzled by novel interpre- 
tations of ancient phrases. When one views 
the profound significance of Jesus’s message 
to all time, one cannot but feel the pathetic 
subterfuge and superstition of insisting on the 
verbal inspiration of Scripture. To exalt the 
importance of words as words is, too often, to 
evade their importance as commands. Jesus 
appreciated the peril of substituting contro- 
versy for conduct, and therefore said that the 
sole way to understand his teaching was to live 
it, thus anticipating the chief stumbling block 
to present-day faith, for what the churches wish 
us to believe is always matter for dispute, but 
what Jesus wishes us to do is still to-day, de- 
spite all the accidents of language, too plain 
for any man’s disputing. 

If the mere words are sacrosanct, please, 
just which words, those of Jesus’s own lost 
Aramaic, those of Luke’s Greek, those of 
Wiclif’s English, those of the King James 
version, or those of Weymouth, Ballantine, or 
van Loon? Which words, whose words, are 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 67 


to be chosen as literally inspired? Now Jesus 
had just two ways of writing his personality 
upon the pages of history, and one of those 
ways was words, and because the words were 
pitifully limited to the limited usage of his own 
period, they have always put limitations on 
the natural, vigorous spread of Jesus’s evangel. 
In the relation of that evangel to the words 
into which it has been successively translated, 
this has always happened—the letter has 
always killed it, the spirit has always given it 
life. The spirit of Jesus’s message is so in- 
vincibly stimulating that at whatever date it is 
translated into contemporary speech, that date 
at once becomes the starting point of a spiritual 
development which, continuing for a century 
or two, then requires a fresh translation to fit 
the thought itself germinated by those earlier 
terms grown obsolete. The test of a creed’s 
vitality is that the words of which it is com- 
posed should necessarily become too cramped 
to hold the spiritual content that the creed 
itself has engendered. All live seeds burst their 
casing just as all live persons burst the cere- 
ments of dead language, and just as a living 


68 CHAOS AND A CREED 


God folds from him the wrappings of a finite 
creed. 


The Contemporary and the Universal Meaning 


Jesus always distinguished shrewdly be- 
tween what was vital in the contemporary ma- 
terial on which he must make his impression 
and what was decadent. Jesus, like Shake- 
speare, was not inventive, but creative, and like 
him took what he found ready in human nature, 
and elevated it to the height of his own pur- 
pose. Each of the two had too much respect 
for the men of his own period to wish to sepa- 
rate himself from them by any eccentricity of 
his own. Shakespeare took the grotesque trag- 
edy of blood and recreated it by putting into 
it all the subtlety of a Hamlet. Jesus took the 
poor little provincial dialect he was born to, 
and attached to it meanings that have a uni- 
versal and eternal application. Yet the life 
Jesus put into these terms has never wholly 
escaped the contamination of the death element 
there is in all language. Language is always 
a changing thing, and so outworn terms are 
always being sloughed off and new terms being 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS _ 69 


sprouted. Because language is incessantly 
altering, to make Christ’s teaching dependent 
on the language of any one period is not to 
preserve that teaching, but to destroy it. Is it 
conceivable that anyone who believes Jesus in- 
destructible can at the same time believe his 
survival dependent on any accident of mere 
words? ‘To me it seems that the most reverent 
way to read the gospel of Jesus is in its suc- 
cessive translations from Mark to Moffat, for 
each of these translations will portray Jesus 
as he appears to the popular mind at that date, 
and the successive dates will furnish the only 
true chronological record of the Resurrection 
appearances of Jesus. Why be afraid that any 
change of words could annul him? In one way 
or another people are always kurying Jesus, 
and always, divine, aloof, ironic, Jesus is 
emerging from the tomb with a new face. 
Nothing has been amore death-dealing hand- 
icap to the adoption of Jesus’s idealism than 
the way that successive periods of history have 
distorted to their own contemporary interpre- 
tation, terms that Jesus employed to fit the 
minds and usage of his own immediate audi- 


70 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ence. The reader who goes to four little Greek 
manuscripts to eavesdrop upon Jesus the street 
preacher should keep always sharp before his 
eyes the faces of that dusty crowd upon some 
corner of old Jerusalem. To-day Jesus is often 
separated from us by much pomp and circum- 
stance, by much embroidered ritual and elabo- 
rate dogma, but the Jesus of first-century Je- 
rusalem appeared in the humble guise of a 
quack doctor and itinerant preacher, being re- 
garded by those high in church and state and 
fashionable society much as we regard a Salva- 
tion Army captain. Up in Galilee Jesus had 
from time to time a great following, but even 
there the mob was so fickle that it was ready 
to make him a king one day, and the next morn- 
ing go off grumbling because he refused to 
feed them indefinitely. But in his own Jeru- 
salem Jesus did not make much more impres- 
sion than he would to-day in our own New 
York. He was a discredited street orator, put 
out of the church because of his iconoclastic 
remarks. So he stood and preached anywhere 
to anyone low enough in the social scale to stop 
and listen to him. Thus circumscribed to the 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 71 


mentality of his hearers, Jesus spoke as an 
Oriental to Orientals—his language was spir- 
itual, pictorial, flashing out from time to time 
in Oriental imagery, brutally vivid. Any think- 
ing Christian should also admit that Jesus was 
himself restricted by the language and the 
mentality of his own time and place, precisely 
as his hearers and as we ourselves are thus re- 
stricted. Unless Jesus accepted every human 
handicap, he has no message for humanity. 
Unless he was first contemporary, he cannot 
be eternal. Unless Jesus was a man, to call 
him God is to invalidate his achievement. We 
should have vivid in our minds the scene, the 
date, the audience, and the speaker, before we 
either accept the words of Jesus as being the 
foundation of elaborate theological systems, or 
reject them, for the same reason. 

Jesus taught certain principles of conduct 
that he believed eternal, but he was forced to 
teach them in words that he knew to be ephem- 
eral. Modern current opinion, both educated 
and uneducated, both in the church and out 
of it, credits Jesus with the invention, rather 
than the mere illustrative employment, of 


(2 CHAOS AND A CREED 


many conceptions popularly labeled Christian, 
such as Heaven, Hell, the Day of Judgment, 
the Second Coming. But the real fact appears 
to be that in the current rabbinical teaching, 
in the late popular prophetic rhapsody, in the 
constant literal interpretation of figurative and 
spiritual Scripture—in other words, in the 
minds of his audience—Jesus found ready to 
his hand, and all made before he was born, the 
conception of a Heaven where the good were 
rewarded, a Hell where the bad were punished, 
an entire system of demonology and angelol- 
ogy, a Last Day when the righteous and the 
sinful should be separated, the flaming advent 
of a savior from the sky. Jesus did not 
originate, but utilized, these conceptions as a 
vehicle of new truth to minds bound by old 
ideas, and undoubtedly one reason we of to- 
day, both those of us within and those of us 
without the churches, come to grief in our un- 
derstanding of these ancient terms, which have 
now become so distressingly controversial, is 
that the brains that received them from Jesus’s 
lips were brains so held by the contemporary 
connotations that they were unable to trans- 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 73 


mit them to us with the spiritual richness and 
clarity which Jesus attached to them. ‘There is 
no sure way to interpret the words of Jesus 
except by incessantly referring them to his 
character. Before Jesus’s time and after it, 
through all the centuries, how much has been 
said and written and believed about the Day of 
Judgment, but look at the parable of the Last 
Day, as Jesus spoke it and read it in the light 
of his own constant practice of his own preach- 
ing, and see if it teaches anything but his own 
new method of demarcation, inconceivably 
novel to an audience emasculated by Pharisa- 
ism, that good people are those who do good, 
not merely refrain from evil, and that doing 
good means service to others, not merely obe- 
dience to ecclesiastics—add to this the satiric 
humor which pictures the good as asking with 
sincerity, When did we serve God? and the 
wicked as asking with hypocrisy, When did we 
not serve God?—and you have an illustration 
of how Jesus took the Day of Judgment as 
the church people of his time were teaching it, 
and put into it a deathless principle of behavior 


74 CHAOS AND A CREED 


that turned against the Pharisees a weapon 
taken from their own doctrines. 


Jesus's Employment of the Word Hell 


There are throughout the entire gospel nar- 
rative many phrases and terms used by Jesus 
that have been appropriated by theology to fit 
its own narrower ideas, but of these phrases 
perhaps none have served more to nullify the 
purpose of Jesus than the medieval and the 
modern construction put on the three, “Hell,” 
“forgiveness of sins,” and the “Kingdom of 
Heaven.” If for myself I frankly reject the 
theological elaboration of these words simply 
because I cannot see that Jesus used them with 
any such man-made meanings, I must apolo- 
gize to the devout for what may seem an irrev- 
erence. There are many people to whom the 
dogma and authority of others will always be 
vital conditions for their own spiritual growth. 
To these I say, the test of any article of any 
creed is that it shall liberate rather than con- 
strict, that it shall make us discontented with 
our actions rather than complacent in our be- 
liefs. The study of Jesus is an adventure in 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS = 75 


aspiration never to be circumscribed. Regard 
for doctrine taught, rather than for doctrine 
lived, was the essence of Pharisaism, and what 
Pharisaism did to Jesus in the year A.D. 33 
is still plain in the year 1925. 

Throughout all the two thousand years of 
theological history, how many persons, one 
wonders, have ever really thought they them- 
selves would ever go to Hell. Hell has always 
been a place where we consigned others, never 
ourselves, therefore, as feeding complacency. 
Hell has ever been stultifying as a motive, and 
whatever difficulties there may always be in 
construing the words of Jesus, as they have 
come down to us, there is always one clue: 
Jesus never stultifies, he always stimulates. It 
is by the light of this fundamental character- 
istic of every incentive that J esus ever offered, 
that we must test all interpretations of all his 
sayings. , 

Now there are two widely different words 
used by Jesus, both alike translated, Hell. 
Jesus speaking to a group familiar with the 
environs of Jerusalem, from time to time em- 
ployed the word Gehenna to describe the anni- 


76 CHAOS AND A CREED 


hilation to which all evil elements in life are 
doomed. Evil, he teaches, is always in process 
of conflict, constantly menacing our free de- 
velopment, constantly itself being cut away 
from us and annihilated. By means of quick 
impressionist language Jesus is exhorting a 
quick, impressionable audience. Evil, he tells 
them, is being incessantly destroyed, just as in 
the public pit beyond the city walls the city 
refuse is being dumped into the scavenger fires 
of Gehenna, always kept burning for sanitary 
purposes. Jesus utilizes the word Gehenna as 
a vivid illustration precisely as some preacher 
to-day might refer to the municipal inciner- 
ating plant, to illustrate the principle of a 
cleansing destruction eternally operative. 
The other term translated Hell, is the Greek 
word Hades, the name the Greeks applied to 
that vague region where souls survived, pro- 
vided they did survive. The Hellenic race 
never had a vivid sense of the after-world, 
never let any dwelling on the end blur their 
bright sunshine, thus Hades throughout all 
Greek literature is merely the name for that 
shadowy spot where good and bad alike go 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS ‘7 


after death. Jesus employs the word Gehenna 
or the word Hades according to his context. 
It is better, he says, that a man cut out his eye, 
cut off his hand—that is, excise from his per- 
sonality, at whatever cost, anything that stunts 
his spiritual growth—rather than that his whole 
being become so corrupt as to require, like city 
offal, the cleansing flames of Gehenna. But in 
the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the word 
used is not Gehenna, but Hades. When one 
tries to go and listen to the language of Jesus 
on the spot where it was spoken, his employ- 
ment of the words Gehenna and Hades seems 
a curiously slight foundation on which to erect 
the elaborate fabric of a medieval Hell, and 
the fact that such a structure could have been 
conceived, so seductive for the itsagination, so 
subversive for ethics, is only one instance to 
show how theology has caught at the words 
of Jesus and wrenched them from their con- 
temporary setting and significance. 
Unfortunately, to remove the words of Jesus 
from their contemporary setting is at the same 
time to remove from them their immediate mes- 
sage for our time as much as for their own. 


78 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Jesus always emphasized earth-life, not after- 
life. Therefore what he says of Hell should be 
read in connection with what he says of 
Heaven, and still more with what he says of 
earth. Like the kingdom of Heaven, the king- 
dom of Hell is within us. To make either one 
a place rather than a condition of mind, is in- 
fantile. 'To remove either Heaven or Hell from 
Now and Here, and relegate them to some 
misty post-mundane existence, illustrates the 
subterfuge of all eras in evading Jesus’s con- 
stant direction away from doctrine toward 
conduct. 

It is only honest to admit that many of 
Jesus’s allusions to Hell are puzzling. Pos- 
sibly these passages have suffered above others 
in transmission, not alone through the difficulty 
of rightly reporting words often enigmatic to 
his immediate hearers, but far more through 
the slow development of human conceptions 
of the divine. Men have always made their 
own Hells, both those they merely described 
and those they actually lived, but what Jesus 
meant by Hell we are probably still too dense 
to comprehend. The thoughtful Christian can 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 79 


only approximate that meaning by referring it 
to the meanings Jesus has put into other words. 
As slowly and humbly I try to formulate my 
own faith, more and more in my study of the 
records, I see Jesus as belonging not to a dead 
past, nor to an unborn future, but to the living 
present, and so for me always the test of 
Jesus’s words is their immediacy, not whether 
they square with traditional dogma, but 
whether they square with the facts of daily 
living. 

These, then, are my conclusions in regard 
to the whole conception of Hell in its relation 
to the history of human evolution: first, that 
it is not the conception of Jesus, but a miscon- 
ception put upon his words; and second, that 
by all the laws of psychology that underlie it, 
the idea of Hell, whenever and wherever it has 
appeared, has always impeded the free and 
fearless development of the soul. Of one truth 
we may always be sure, Jesus never taught 
anything subversive to the spirit as it emerges 
from the beast, but in the whole idea of Hell 
there has always been more that is akin to the 
animal within us than to the man within us. 


80 CHAOS AND A CREED 

Obviously, it has always been impossible for 
the imagination to visualize Hell as a place of 
spiritual rather than of physical torment and 
yet it is a childish and retrogressive view of life 
to believe that sin, a spiritual offense, can be 
punished by bodily tortures. One of the great- 
est deterrents to a better social order to-day is 
that we still think of crime and punishment as 
two separated experiences. Our whole system 
of penology rests on this atavistic fallacy. We 
cannot advance far either as a race or as indi- 
viduals until we recognize the truth that crime 
carries with it the instant penalty of a curtail- 
ment of personality, a truth always clear in 
Jesus's teaching. The conception of Hell has 
always cut deeper into our spiritual life than 
most of us would acknowledge, especially those 
of us who have always rejected it as a mere > 
superstition. So long as any man thinks of 
the wages of sin as physical or as post-mun- 
dane, or as to be exacted either by an avenging 
public or by an avenging deity, that man has 
obscured for himself just those dangers and 
responsibilities which it is imperative for every 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 81 


individual and for every system of government 
to recognize. 

Perhaps there are no words that Jesus uses 
oftener than some form of the expression, Fear 
not. Any of us can recall instantly his itera- 
tion—Courage, Away with fear, Why are ye 
fearful? O ye of little faith. With all his em- 
phasis on the degrading influence of fear, Jesus 
could hardly have meant that we were to em- 
ploy fear as a motive for goodness, that we 
were to be noble in this world as a means of 
avoiding agony in the next. If that notion is 
repugnant to the lowest of us, how much more 
repugnant to the man who was the highest 
idealist yet produced by humanity! One fact 
is conspicuous in Jesus’s allusions to Gehenna 
—it is not God who puts us there, but our- 
selves. It is not Christ, but Christians, who 
have made God a punisher. No matter how we 
may twist the words of Jesus, we cannot make 
them represent God except as his father. Jesus 
asserts that when we choose evil, we automati- 
cally separate ourselves from God in this world 
quite as much as in any other. His point is 
that evil is instantly destructive of normal 


82 CHAOS AND A CREED 


growth, where or when or how we admit it to 
our character. Evil is that power which dwarfs 
and paralyzes personality. In his references to 
the scavenger fires of Gehenna, Jesus warns 
not against punishment by God, but against 
mutilation by ourselves. Surely we degrade 
the dignity of the human soul, utterly deny 
man’s beauty and charity, so long as we think 
it possible for some of us to be happy in 
Heaven, while any of us are unhappy in Hell. 
So long as we believe that we are as beast-like 
as that, we shall never become human. We 
defile God so long as we believe him actuated 
by petty mortal vengeance. 

The whole conception of Hell is only the 
extreme visualization of one of the most rudi- 
mentary elements of our being, but one of 
which we are always conspicuously vain— 
namely, our sense of justice. The picture of 
God as a punisher is savage and anthropo- 
morphic, a picture made by ourselves for our 
own satisfaction. It is in utter contradiction 
to the portrait of God painted by Jesus for 
our aspiration. There is perhaps nothing we 
know so little about as justice. In fact, our 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 83 


proud sense of justice may be only an inter- 
mediate faculty, to be outgrown the farther we 
advance toward an unknown goal. At any 
rate, the teaching of Jesus makes it plain that 
he expects our man-made Justice, always remi- 
niscent of the savage, to be replaced by a God- 
made kindness, always aspirant toward the di- 
vine. Because the character of Jesus has been 
written upon history in a medium more reliable 
than language, he himself must always be the 
clue to his words. No one who accepts the char- 
acter of Jesus can accept a God who would 
permit a Hell. 


Jesus's Employment of the Words, 
Forgiveness of Sins 


I have dwelt upon this subject in order to 
accentuate, not only a principle of Jesus’s 
teaching, but also a principle of my own faith- 
building, and that is, always to explain the 
obscurities of particular passages by reference 
to the longer context of gospel Scripture as a 
whole, and still more by reference to the far 
larger relation of Jesus’s teaching to past his- 
tory and to present chaos. If we are to accord 


84 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Jesus the same courtesy we pay to other heroes 
of past days, and permit words to vivify rather 
than to bury him, we shall be startled by his 
prevision of the latest psychological methods 
in regard to that experience called forgiveness 
of sins. 

Jesus as a psychologist is a fecund theme. 
Jesus is not obsolete, but so far in advance of 
his own age and of ours that even now econom- 
ics, sociology, and psychology are far behind 
him. While we write treatises concerning the 
mind of the mob, Jesus left no such treatises, 
but repeatedly it is told of him that he walked 
unscathed through a howling rabble mad to 
kill him. He did this, I believe, through no 
supernatural powers, but simply by exercising 
the normal force of an absolutely fearless man. 

Jesus and the modern scientific miracle-man 
differ in this respect, the modern scientist has 
the advantage of technical language in which 
he may express himself, and of an audience 
educated to understand his explanation. Jesus 
had neither of these. The history of all dis- 
covery and invention reveals that often observ- 
ant and adventurous individuals have known 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS _ 85 


and applied laws hundreds of years before 
others have revealed the underlying theory 
governing those laws. Just as Roger Bacon 
in the thirteenth century knew of the existence 
of germs but had no way of transmitting that 
knowledge, so Jesus knew the fact that two 
minds may occupy one body, but while Morton 
Prince can give an account of Miss Beau- 
champ, all Jesus could say to a dissociated per- 
sonality was, “Come out of him.” As I read 
from day to day each fresh achievement of 
science, it seems to me that the barrier be- 
tween spirit and substance becomes every day 
thinner. As I read from day to day each past 
achievement of Jesus, it seems to me that he 
knew, better than for hundreds of years to 
come any of us will know, the relation of mind 
to matter. But Jesus’s knowledge of the human 
mind, like his knowledge of the human soul, 
must be studied not through his explanation 
of it, but through his application of it, for 
Jesus can be observed constantly employing a 
science of the mind and of the soul, to which 
we, clumsy and hesitant as we are, are only 
slowly approximating. For example, telepathy 


86 CHAOS AND A CREED 


as a proved phenomenon is still in dispute by 
psychologists, even while there is hardly a day 
when one is not startled by the evidence of 
thought transference between members of the 
same household. Incessantly the gospel records 
say of Jesus that he read men’s thoughts, knew 
exactly what the priests, skulking behind the 
temple pillars, were muttering, knew precisely 
what mental torments were holding sensitive 
bodies in thrall. The year A.D. 33 did not 
provide Jesus with the language, the receptive 
hearers, or the time, necessary to formulate his 
methods into terms and theory comprehensible 
to us. Mentally he was so far ahead of his 
own age that it was impossible for him to ex- 
press his knowledge of the intellect in the lan- 
guage of his time. And spiritually he was so 
far ahead of our own age that it is equally im- 
possible for him to express his knowledge of 
the spirit in the language of our time. There- 
fore both then and now he has chosen to publish 
his theories not through the medium of words, 
but through the medium of acts. Jesus’s method 
of revelation is always through doctrine ap- 
plied rather than through doctrine discussed, 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS = 87 


and conspicuously in the matter of his healing 
he leaves us to deduce his convictions from our 
observations of his actions. 

Jesus had to be instant in cures and concen- 
trated in teaching, for he had only a few brief 
months in which to impress his methods upon 
the mind of humanity. With dynamic swift- 
ness he went straight to the root of the torture, 
saying to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven. 
There seems to me as little reason for trans- 
lating this laconic announcement of freedom 
into terms of elaborate theological dogma as 
for making out of Jesus’s simple word, Ge- 
henna, all the ramifying structure of the me- 
dieval Hell. It should be the aim of the mod- 
ern and practical Christian to be as modern and 
practical as was Jesus himself, and one means 
toward that end is to try to divest his words 
of their theological connotation, effete with 
controversy, and to realize their profound sci- 
entific accord with present-day thought. The 
greatest contribution made by modern psy- 
chology toward the emancipation of the human 
spirit is that knowledge of the subconscious 
which frees us from old fears. As I read the 


88 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Scriptural words that describe Jesus’s actual 
practice of psychiatry I feel that he had a 
better working knowledge of the subconscious 
than Sigismund Freud. He accounts for his 
success, however, on a different hypothesis. He 
ascribes it to the influence of his own unfal- 
tering faith in God upon the faltering faith 
of his patient. As I contemplate the instancy 
and permanence of his results, I feel that 
Jesus, who explains his cures by reference to 
the god within us, is as worthy of respectful 
attention as Freud, who explains his by ref- 
erence to the beast within us. 

Jesus had neither time nor respect for the 
dubious and lengthy intricacies of the psycho- 
analytic interview, but with a flash of pene- 
tration perceived the crux of his patient’s trou- 
ble. As a sheer creator of personality in others 
Jesus was far in advance of present-day alien- 
ists, but he is in absolute accord with them in 
believing that the greatest deterrent to initia- 
tive is always, in last analysis, fear, in all its 
manifold variations. The words which Jesus 
and his historians are forced to employ have 
become staled to our ears and on our lips, and 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 89 


thus prevent our seeing that when Jesus asserts 
his ability to forgive sins, and when the modern 
alienist asserts his ability to free us from the 
handicap of our past, the psychology employed 
is precisely the same, only Jesus’s method goes 
farther, for he not only frees, but motivates 
and energizes, the personality thus freed. It 
requires some temerity to assert that to my own 
mind the method of Jesus in regard to that 
phenomenon termed forgiveness of sins is far 
more closely akin to the methods of the mod- 
ern psychologist than it is to the connotation 
attached to those familiar words by the 
churches. This theological connotation has two 
aspects, the first viewing God as an avenger 
and creditor, canceling a debt owed to him, 
the second viewing the person forgiven as un- 
dergoing an experience as external and objec- 
tive as having a debt canceled, and as concrete 
and pictorial as that of having a slate wiped 
clean. It is impossible for my faith to accept 
either of these aspects, for the first does not fit 
Jesus’s portrait of God, and the second does 
not fit my everyday observation of human psy- 
chology. Jesus paints God not as a judge, but 


90 CHAOS AND A CREED 


as a father. A judge is responsible only for 
justice, that least understood and least an- 
alyzed of all human concepts. A father is not 
a judge. Whenever a human father consti- 
tutes himself a judge of his children, he ex- 
hibits a reversion and denies himself and them 
normal advance. One thing is clear in our 
evolutional progress, its constant trend to the 
differentiation of mdividuals. There can be 
no such differentiation without free initiative. 
God, therefore, shows his respect for the capa- 
cities of his sons by leaving us free to make 
our own experiments which may either liberate 
us for new adventure, or may chain us to age- 
old weaknesses. But God is father, and not 
judge, and therefore must feel himself respon- 
sible as does a human parent for the conditions 
_ that led up to the sin, and for those conditions 
that shall lead from it. Jesus reveals God to 
us as inalienably our father, because he be- 
lieves this view of God above all other possible 
conceptions of divinity, the one most stimu- 
lating toward that human perfection he came 
to inculcate. Just in proportion as we permit 
any man-made dogma to attribute to God the 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 91 


externality of a creditor, rather than the in- 
timacy of a parent, we invalidate the purpose 
of Jesus’s sojourn upon earth. 

Any theological view that regards the for- 
giveness of sins as a process instantaneous and 
complete, involving no further care on the part 
of the sinner, is as false to the teaching of Jesus 
as it is to the teaching of modern psychology. 
While pronouncing his power to lift the bur- 
den of a man’s past and to stand near to pre- 
vent the return of that burden, Jesus adds the 
sane and scientific caution, “Take care that 
thou sin no more.” The life of Jesus shows that 
when he accepted for himself all human liabil- 
ity, he accepted recurrent temptation, intense 
to the very day of his death. That any man, 
after having yielded to the same crippling 
desire for half a lifetime, can escape overnight 
from all the penalty, is a falsehood never 
taught by the divine common sense of Jesus; 
what he does promise is that he will stand for- 
ever between us and the paralyzing influences 
of our past life if only we will consent to let 
him. He believed that not only such constant 
resistance of weakness, but also the educative 


92 CHAOS AND A CREED 


humility of such association with him, would 
inspire us to that ultimate perfection always 
shining clear to his vision as humanity’s goal. 

That the psycho-therapy of Jesus is in ac- 
cordance with the methods of modern psy- 
chology, but transcends them, and that no 
aspect of his teaching or practice ever contra- 
dicts his fundamental conception of God as a 
father, are the two clues my faith has followed 
in order to ascertain the meaning Jesus him- 
self attaches to those age-old words, “the for- 
giveness of sins.” 


Jesus's Employment of the Words, 
Kingdom of Heaven 


Nothing is a clearer illustration of the peril 
of compressing into the narrow channels of 
dogma, the torrential force of Jesus’s words 
than the way the world has always treated the 
most vitalizmg of all his conceptions, “the 
Kingdom of Heaven.” He did not make the 
term, but he tried to remake it. Nothing more 
tragic ever happened in all the history of 
human aspiration than the turning of the reli- 
gion of Jesus from being what he died to make 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 93 


it, a religion for this world, into a religion for 
the next. When Jesus took an old Hebrew 
phrase and preached his “kingdom of the 
heavens,” he was not thinking of misty pin- 
nacles in the sky, he was thinking of our Capi- 
tolin Washington. Jesus was no anemic mys- 
tic, enervated with contemplation, like a me- 
diezval monk. Jesus was no monk! “Kating 
and drinking, a wine-bibber and the intimate 
of renegades and harlots”—that is the way the 
gospels tell us that people talked against him, 
and yet, they say also, that not his bitterest 
enemies, hounding him, skulking always at his 
heels, could discover in him one tiniest sin! If 
ever a man loved life and the living of it, loved 
this planet and the people on it, it was Jesus 
of Galilee. Of what other hero in history is 
it written that he loved life so much that he 
sweated blood at the agony of leaving it? It is 
usually recorded of heroes that they met death 
nonchalantly. No soldier on any battlefield 
ever faced death in such a torture of relin- 
quishment as did Jesus on Gethsemane. This 
was because, more than any man before or 
since, Jesus reverenced life. He was himself 


94 CHAOS AND A CREED 


young, vigorous, electric, burning to heal suf- 
fering bodies, and to clarify polluted creeds. 
To save, to teach! He felt himself blazing with 
the passion of service, and he had only a few 
brief hounded months in which to express him- 
self. There is no intenser temptation known 
to history than that which Jesus resisted when 
he consented to draw back within himself all 
the upward surging of the splendid life within 
him, and submitted to be buried as a seed. 

It is tragedy that a church named for one 
who was himself the livest man who ever lived, 
and who of all men most reverenced life, should 
itself have been accused for two thousand 
years, and justly accused, of being more con- 
cerned for the after-world than for this one! 
Jesus did not come to this world to show people 
how to get to another, but how to make this 
one more like the other. When Jesus talks of 
the Kingdom of Heaven, he is not talking 
about those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones 
see, but of what the blessed ones ought to be 
doing on this present Monday. When Jesus 
says that he gives people eternal life, he is not 
talking about an everlasting and vaguely glo- 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 95 


rious nothingness; he is saying, I am ready to 
put into you at this very moment the principle 
of fearless and exhaustless growth. 

Jesus cannot be held accountable for the 
after-worldliness of Christianity. The ener- 
vating ease and comfort of a post-mundane ex- 
istence are not pictures drawn by Jesus. They 
were pictures painted first by the Jewish church 
of his time, and then amplified by the church of 
later times, and the effect in both instances was 
the evasion of earth and its problems. It is 
true that Jesus, in anguish of pity for the suf- 
fering he foresaw for his dearest friends, prom- 
ises them “abiding places in my father’s home.” 
The word he uses is significantly colorless, ut- 
terly adequate, but without allu;wement. Jesus 
sanctioned no enervating raptures about the 
life to be. His promises in regard to heavenly 
bliss are vague when compared with the vigor 
he promises to his followers here on earth. To 
these he offers not ease and inertia, but perse- 
cution, scorn, ridicule, and ostracism, bitterer 
sacrifice to establish the rule of love than has 
ever yet been made to establish the rule of 
might. 


96 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Jesus meant by the term, Kingdom of 
Heaven, simply his own ideal social order, an 
ideal to be made actual by applied faith. The 
cynical Sadducees, who were the politicians of 
his day, regarded Jesus’s Kingdom of Heaven 
exactly as the politicians in every country to- 
day would regard a Utopia preached to an in- 
flammable crowd by some village carpenter. 
The term Kingdom of Heaven has been 
planted in the soil of human speech for two 
thousand years, but it is only recently that 
people have begun to wonder whether Jesus’s 
unpractical kingdom of kindness may not be 
as promising an experiment as our present 
very unpromising kingdom of violence. Christ’s 
idea of a social and economic structure founded 
on the principle of live-and-let-live must really 
have been growing vigorously, if secretly, for 
two thousand years, or to-day the most forcible 
pleading to allow Christ at last to enter Chris- 
tendom would not be coming, as it is coming, 
from chambers of commerce! Jesus was very 
careful in his presentation of his new social 
order. He gave principles, but never particu- 
lars. Jesus never broke a law, and never made 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 97 


one. But he taught people how to keep laws 
and how to make them. Keep laws and make 
them in such a way as to release rather than 
to restrict, personality—this is Jesus’s law for 
lawmakers. 

Dust-grimed and disregarded, Jesus has 
been tramping the streets of this world for 
two thousand years, so that to-day there is no 
one of us who is not familiar with his figure. 
So well does every one of us know him that 
there is not one of us who does not know ex- 
actly what would be Jesus’s reply to any ques- 
tion, personal, national, international. ‘There 
is no problem before any one of us to which 
we cannot hear Jesus’s answer, down to his 
very phrasing, his intonation, his ironic gaze. 
There is not one of us who does not know that 
the sole reason we do not follow Jesus’s ad- 
vice is that we are afraid to. 

This is one man’s defense of the faith that 
is in him. I believe in Christianity because it 
has never been tried. How can Christianity 
be outworn if it has never yet existed? Where, 
when, has the experiment of Christianity ever 
been made by any nation? Once again Christ 


98 CHAOS AND A CREED 


has been killed by the word that describes him. 
Christianity is not Christ. In the eternal fight 
of faith against fear, we have permitted Chris- 
tianity to become not Christ, but compromise. 
Because we are afraid to apply the ethics of 
the Kingdom of Heaven we have compromised 
with ecclesiasticism, so that it is possible in 
our churches to-day to wrangle over the man- 
ner of Jesus’s infancy while within earshot five- 
year-olds are working ten hours on the truck 
farms of New Jersey! Because we are afraid 
to apply the politics of the Kingdom of 
Hfeaven, we compromise by saying that the 
place for Christians is in the church, but not in 
Cabinet offices. Because we are afraid to apply 
the politics of the Kingdom of Heaven, we 
compromise by saying that it is good for busi- 
ness to be friendly with a next-door neighbor, 
but bad for business to be friendly with a next- 
door nation. Of all Utopias, the one which peo- 
ple have most feared is Jesus’s Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

Christ has been buried under compromise, 
but the principles of his kingdom are uncom- 
promising: truth always, and never subter- 


OO a 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 99 


fuge; kindness always, and never violence; love 
always, and never hatred; service always, and 
never selfishness; energy always, and never in- 
ertia; God always first, and money always last. 
How palpably absurd it all is! Yet the alter- 
native that for twenty centuries we have pre- 
ferred, is it any less absurd? Jesus believed his 
principles to be the only ones that guarantee 
the race growth, not decay; life, not death; 
evolution toward the man, not retrogression 
toward the beast. Nothing that has yet oc- 
curred has proved him wrong. Defiled as 
Christianity has been by its supporters, and 
derided as it has been by its opponents, wher- 
ever the principles of Jesus’s social order have 
been embodied in any honest individual or en- 
terprise, they shine forth as the most energiz- 
ing ever observed. Nothing has delayed the 
realizing of Jesus’s ideal so much as our per- 
suading ourselves that this ideal is too good 
for this world, and therefore must refer to the 
next. But as Jesus uses the words, Kingdom 
of Heaven, they apply not to ancient Jeru- 
salem, nor yet to Jerusalem the Golden; they 
apply to us and to now. 


100 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Christ was never the coward that the Chris- 
tian is. He had immeasurably more faith in 
us than we have ever had in ourselves, for while 
he formulated the principles of his Christian 
commonwealth, he never formulated the par- 
ticulars. He has been lately accused of utter- 
ing no protest against slavery, against war. 
No, he left to us the breaking of all fetters, the 
laying down of all swords. He set going in the 
world forces invincible for freedom and for 
peace, but for himself, the man who was to 
become the inspiration of millions, he was hum- 
bly content to make the trodden bond-slaves of 
his own time know themselves the sons of God, 
humbly content to say to his own Peter, under 
circumstances when of all times violence would 
have seemed excusable, “Thrust back thy sword 
within its scabbard.” Jesus had too much re- 
spect for human personality to lay down any 
law that might bind, but only principles that 
should liberate, initiative. Jesus did not remain 
in this world to establish either for the timorous 
mob of his own day or for the timorous mate- 
rialists of our day that social order which shall 
provide greater opportunity for the develop- 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 101 


ment of the soul than of the salesman. Jesus 
revealed in his own personality how fearless 
men might be if only they believed that the 
spirit animating their bodies is the spirit not 
of beast, but of God—and then he left men 
free to build, or not to build, the Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

It sometimes appears as if all the words that 
Jesus himself spoke and all the words that 
others wrote of him have at one time or another 
served to obscure both him and their meaning 
for humanity. And yet words appear to be 
the sole human invention for which Jesus 
showed any respect. He reverenced words for 
their power to transmit and to st.nulate human 
achievement, and yet at the same time he per- 
ceived the power of words to conceal and to 
annul, and so he intrusted his message not 
alone to language, but also to another medium, 
less fallible, less subject to death and decay. 
For human inventions, other than words, Jesus 
had scant time and attention, for the purpose 
of his career was to give life and to give it more 
‘abundantly, and he perceived that human in- 


102 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ventions may or may not give life to the soul 
in its hungry ascent. On one occasion when 
people tried to point out to him the splendors 
of temple architecture, he turned away impa- 
tiently. We can fancy his turning away with 
the same impatience if we moderns tried to 
impress him with our own proudest achieve- 
ments in organization or in machinery. Sup- 
pose we took him, the rustic Nazarene, to the 
Stock Exchange, and exhibited the miracle of 
an organization ramifying to every corner of 
the planet. In comment Jesus would use tran- 
sient words, the words of our own transient 
day, but we all know what they would be. He 
would ask, “And all this for money?” Or sup- 
pose we should take this ignorant Galilean car- 
penter to visit a modern battleship, epitome 
of all inventive skill, embodying the work of 
myriad hands, the imagination of myriad 
brains, we know what words Jesus would use. 
He would ask, “And all this for destruction?” 

Of human inventions Jesus reverences only 
words, and therefore in so far as they might 
serve, he committed himself to their keeping. 


OLD WORDS AND OLD MEANINGS 103 


Jesus, who always first yielded to death and 
then conquered it, submitted to all the acci- 
dents of mortal dissolution, of which one of 
the most potent is the decay of language, its 
constant impotence to express the thought of 
one age to another. The very familiarity of 
phrases, the falsity and indignity with which 
they have been forced to support some conten- 
tious human opinion, have helped to bury 
Jesus. But it should be the effort of every man 
who believes Jesus alive, to realize the full force 
of creative ability Jesus can pour into words, 
and to free him from the cerements of dead 
terms, and thus, each man for himself, to reani- 
mate all Scripture. For every one of us who 
goes to the four gospels to listen, for himself, 
to the street preacher from Galilee, words shall 
either entomb Jesus or enshrine him. Although 
the whole historical career of Jesus is recorded 
only in the cramped, stammering language of 
four tiny, ancient pamphlets, and although that 
language has been wrenched and twisted to fit 
the ephemeral creeds and justify the compro- 
mised conduct of every age that has followed, 


104 CHAOS AND A CREED 


still to-day for each of us who stands and 
listens, one among that eager, humble crowd in 
old Jerusalem, there shall forever spring forth, 
living, from that ancient record, the portrait 
of humanity’s one fearless man. 


Chapter VI: The Supernormal, 
Its Relation to Faith 


abe study the words of Jesus from the point 
of view of his contemporary audience is the 
surest way to appreciate their universal mean- 
ing for all audiences and all times. In like 
manner the surest way to appreciate the eternal 
significance of the events recorded in the gos- 
pels is to look at them first in their contem- 
porary setting. A man must avoid the two 
long telescopes set up for his use, one by theol- 
ogy, one by science, and go back alone to the 
year A.D. 30, and observe at close range for 
himself the acts of Jesus. Such disregard of 
guidance has its perils, but when one gazes at 
the present chaos of all opinion, and at the 
obvious fallibility and the real paucity of all 
leadership, there seems no choice but to puzzle 
out for oneself the path to belief. The present 
105 


106 CHAOS AND A CREED 


screaming of controversy from pulpit to pulpit 
wins no converts to Christ. One turns away 
to the summons of a calmer voice that speaks 
across the centuries, “Follow me.” As I try 
to struggle past the obstacles set in my way 
both by the church and by science, and some- 
how come near enough to listen to that low 
authoritative voice, I have no pride of self- 
assurance or originality. Many, many men 
throughout twenty centuries must have found 
the same path and have described it far better 
than I shall do, and yet to-day that path is 
curiously obscured. Here in this book I define 
humbly enough the reasons for my own faith, 
with no purpose but perhaps here and there to 
stimulate some other puzzled mind to make its 
own adventure. I am saying only, “This is 
what I believe, and this is why I believe it.” 
I am not asking of a creed theory, but guid- 
ance, not is it believable, but is it livable? Jesus 
alone among religious teachers dares to postu- 
late, “My teaching is something no one can 
believe until he has tried it.” 

It is the so-called supernatural elements in 
the career of Jesus that have always presented 


THE SUPERNORMAL 107 


the greatest difficulties to modern minds. Su- 
pernatural events are narrated in the gospels 
in language so naive as to be almost incompre- 
hensible to present-day science. What opinion 
is it possible for a thinking man to hold in 
regard to the four questions: Was Jesus a 
myth or aman? Did he, or did he not, perform 
miracles? Was his birth natural or supernatu- 
ral? Did he, or did he not, manifest himself 
after death? 


Was Jesus a Myth or a Man? 


It is very easy, very plausible to relegate 
Jesus to the region of myth, and then go 
blithely on one’s way, unabashed by his dis- 
concerting mystery. The quickest way to get 
rid of Jesus is to call him a myth, but this 
method of burial has proved no more effectual 
against his resurrection than the method of the 
Pharisees, or of Pilate, or of the Jewish mob. 
The burial of Jesus as a myth is unsuccessful 
so long as there is any man left anywhere to 
ask of his own brain, If Jesus was not divine, 
then how account for whatever man was divine 
enough to invent him? 


108 CHAOS AND A CREED 


It is just as difficult for history to prove any 
Jew of the first or second century capable of 
inventing such a character, as it is for psychol- 
ogy to prove that any man of any century has 
ever been capable of creating a Jesus. It is not 
so easy for men to create a god as some men 
seem to think. It is true that the idea of in- 
carnation is so old as to antedate history and 
so widespread that there is only one race that 
has never had it. Jesus was a man, Jesus was 
a Jew; in mentality, in spirituality, Jesus was 
a Jew. How can any fanatic ever forget that 
Christianity is of the Jews? It is a strange and 
most arresting anomaly that while the Jewish 
race furnished the individual for the incarna- 
tion, the Jewish race, alone among races, has 
never admitted the possibility of incarnation, 
or of demigod or hero. So revolting to the 
Hebrews were all such conceptions as they 
observed them among their pagan neighbors, 
that they never permitted in their plastic arts 
any representation of beast-forms, much less 
of the human body. From Joseph to Rabbi 
Wise, no man of Jewish creed has ever believed 
that Jehovah has ever manifested himself in 


THE SUPERNORMAL 109 


human shape. For the faith-builder it is mat- 
ter for profound conjecture that Jesus should 
have appeared from among a nation that alone 
among all nations has never believed in any 
incarnation, and that he should have appeared 
at a time and in an environment when of all 
times and of all places in history men were 
least equipped with the imagination or the 
spiritual vigor necessary for inventing a god. 
1t is true that many races have pictured their 
gods in mortal form, but never the Jews. It 
may also be true that certain individual men 
at certain times have conceived of a god in 
human flesh, but never such men as Peter and 
John. 

To other peoples of the New Testament era 
the conception of incarnate deity was familiar 
enough. The Romans became degraded enough 
to worship their emperor, while all through 
Greek literature, the gods step in and out of 
human semblance as naturally as men put on 
and off a garment. The difference between 
Greek and Jew is conspicuous in the New 
Testament narrative itself. So alien to Jewish 
thought was all idea of god-man that even 


110 CHAOS AND A CREED 


after three years of intimacy with Jesus, in the 
last hour of their association with him, his dis- 
ciples are still grossly unaware of his true 
nature. 'The Hebrews had so much reverence 
for God, so little reverence for man, that they 
could not conceive any man as divine. But the 
Greeks had so little respect for their gods, so 
much respect for men, that they were ready in 
an hour to call Barnabas Jupiter and Paul 
Mercury. So repulsive was all idea of incar- 
nation to the Jewish people, to every one of 
them, from high priest to lowest slave, that 
there was not a dissenting voice when a man 
was crucified for the blasphemy of calling him- 
self God’s son. If one looks straight at the 
historic conditions of Jesus’s death, can one 
possibly believe that men to whom all thought 
of incarnation was repugnant, men who in ad- 
dition were feeble, humble, doubtful, at the 
mercy of the powerful who had killed their 
master, men in all the bewilderment and grief 
of a lost cause and their leader’s execution, 
should within six weeks’ time be preaching in 
an ecstasy of courage and conviction stagger- 


THE SUPERNORMAL 111 


ing for any honest student of history to ex- 
plain, that Jesus is the son of Jehovah? 
Now time is an absolutely indispensable ele- 
ment in all myth-making. Myth is always 
slowly formed, gathering accretions gradually 
from vague, folk-lore sources. As I tried to 
show a few pages back, the gospel narrative 
was not separated from its events by that lapse 
of years that rationalists take for granted. Ac- 
cording to biblical scholarship as unimpeach- 
able in its fearless research as that of any sci- 
entist, the gospel account, first spoken, then 
written, was almost contemporary with the oc- 
currences it records. No man was ever made 
into a god overnight, especially no man who 
had just undergone the public ignominy of a 
criminal’s execution. It must be remembered 
that the mob fury against Jesus was due to 
disappointment in him. For generation after 
generation a people snarling in bitter slavery 
had fed their bafflement on the expectation of a 
national deliverer. But the promise of deliv- 
erance had dissolved into a madman’s talk of 
an unearthly kingdom, and an unearthly for- 
bearance. It was not his alien executioners but 


112 CHAOS AND A CREED 


his own countrymen who ringed the cross of 
Jesus with their foul upbraidings. Even his 
friend Cleopas reflects the prevailing mood of 
utter disillusion when he says, “But we were 
hoping that it was he who was about to ransom 
Israel.’’ People in such a mood as followed 
the death of Jesus do not at once proceed to 
make a god out of a felon! 

The innate attitude of the Jewish people 
toward all incarnation, and their aggravated 
hostility to it in the period immediately fol- 
lowing Jesus’s death, are arguments reached 
by a study of past history, but for a man who 
would build his faith stone by stone from the 
bottom up, the argument not from past his- 
tory, but from universal psychology, has the 
greater weight. The men who gave the world 
the story of Jesus were men as incapable of 
inventing him as they were of adequately de- 
scribing him. Legend is invariably garrulous; 
myth is invariably extravagant. Actual myth- 
making, as, for example, it may be studied in 
the civilization of Egypt or of India, often 
shows aspiration, but always shows anthro- 
pomorphism. In so far as myth reveals the 


THE SUPERNORMAL 113 


desire of man to have a god, it is noble and 
ennobling—but in all genuine myth there can 
be seen also the Caliban desire to be a god. 
Myth is always fantastic and endlessly in- 
ventive. The stark brevity and simplicity of 
the gospels is as alien to myth as day to night. 
Every myth-made god betrays some element 
of grossness; the naked sublimity of the Gali- 
lean Jesus still transcends every human ideal. 
Cynical and pagan as we are, still, with Pilate, 
we can find in him no fault at all. It is not for 
any imperfection in Jesus that we still, like 
Pilate, consent to his killing. Against Pilate, 
the man he condemned offered no violence, ut- 
tered no reproach, but, obviousty, Pilate had 
the best of reasons for being afraid of him. 
If the disciples of Jesus were myth-makers 
and erected a god out of a mere man, clearly 
they did so either with intentional falsehood 
or without it, for there was no time for the 
ordinary growth of folk-legend. History shows 
that the conception of Jesus as a god-man 
was complete, essentially unchanged from then 
to now, within a few months of his death. 
Therefore either Jesus was exactly such an 


114 CHAOS AND A CREED 


actual person as his biographers reveal him, or 
those biographers, humble, untaught, ignorant 
men, got together, and with the most subtle and 
skillful collaboration presented to the world 
the highest ideal of humanity ever known to 
man. Yet those men seem of all men the least 
capable of any imaginative achievement what- 
soever. And there is a deeper argument to be 
answered. Men capable of imagining such per- 
fection are not instantly and at the same time 
capable of lying. Inconceivable sublimity in 
one region of a man’s soul, and basest decep- 
tion in another, is a psychological phenomenon 
flatly impossible. He is a blind and flimsy 
faith-builder who disregards the simple facts 
of human character as both history and his own 
common sense reveal them to him. For myself, 
the whole question of the mythical element in 
the gospel narrative receives illumination from 
the fact of the thirty hidden years. Before we 
call the gospel writers mere myth-makers, be- 
fore we call Jesus a mere miracle-monger, we 
should take into account the psychology of all 
myth-makers and of all miracle-mongers. If 
any one of these four biographies had been 


THE SUPERNORMAL 115 


fabricated, the tale of those thirty years of ob- 
security would have been filled with inventions. 
To me, none of the miracles Jesus is said to 
have performed is so convincing as the fact, 
unquestioned by anyone, that during thirty 
years he refrained from performing any. No 
myth-maker could have kept himself silent, no 
miracle-monger could have kept himself hum- 
ble, for thirty years. If the evangelists did not 
consciously deceive the world, the alternative 
is clearly that with the uttermost truthfulness 
that was in them they tried to depict the un- 
precedented personage they had known, telling 
what their own eyes had seen, what their own 
ears had heard, what their own hearts had felt, 
and, in the last gospel of all, what their own 
brains had thought—telling it all so unaffect- 
edly that for the world to-day the man por- 
trayed stands forth as direct and challenging as 
in the day when his disciples saw and heard and 
knew him. 

Of the four gospels it is the last that has 
been oftenest dismissed as fabricated. Jesus 
never existed, not the Jesus of John; John 
made him up, so scholars have often said. The 


116 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Jesus of John is so beautiful as to be unbe- 
lievable—therefore some man invented him! 
That “therefore” is to my mind the most as- 
tounding therefore in the whole history of 
human reasoning! Suppose we should grant 
the inconceivable premise that any man capable 
of inventing such sublimity could at the same 
time have been capable of foisting a fabrication 
upon the world, there still stands before my 
faith this dilemma: since it is impossible for 
my reason to believe any human man capable 
of inventing the God-man Jesus, then I must 
either accept and reverence the Jesus of John 
or I must believe John himself, by virtue of 
so divine a conception, a God-man and rev- 
erence him. 


Did Jesus Perform Miracles? 


Agnosticism finds it as easy to dismiss the 
miracles as to dismiss the man, as being both 
alike legendary. Such dismissal is seductively 
easy, but there are certain characteristics of 
the miracles of Jesus that prevent my brain 
from disregarding them. I am keenly aware 
how curiously superstitious I must appear to 


THE SUPERNORMAL 117 


my agnostic friends in my frank respect for 
the miracles. In every period, for any indi- 
vidual to associate with Jesus has meant some 
sacrifice of caste. Imagine asking a Harvard 
senior of to-day to associate intimately with a 
Jewish carpenter two thousand years dead! It 
is never a light matter to incur the scorn of 
one’s companions. It is no light matter to-day 
for a minister to come out boldly for Jesus as 
he sees him. Not to look at Jesus for oneself is 
to deny him resurrection, and yet for any man 
of us to permit the tomb of Jesus to remain 
sealed may be to risk as heavy a responsibility 
toward his fellows as Pilate risked twenty cen- 
turies ago. Although I write as a mere lay- 
man, not to be called to the bar by any bishop 
or presbytery, still I know clearly what it 
means for any man like me, one to be roughly 
catalogued as belonging to the intellectuals, 
to look his friends in the eyes, appreciating all 
their controlled pity and astonishment, and 
confess, “Yes, I believe that Jesus turned 
water into wine; yes, I believe Jesus raised the 
dead to life.” Yet, even from the point of view 
of people whose opinions are diametric to my 


118 CHAOS AND A CREED 


own, I cannot see how anyone can observe the 
present-day miracles of chemistry, physics, 
biology, and escape the surmise that the mir- 
acles of Jesus may at any time be duplicated 
and explained by modern science. Jesus, like 
many another man in history, may have been 
merely in advance of his time in employing for 
his use laws that he made no attempt to ex- 
pound. It is quite possible to believe that men 
may at some future date be able to explain all 
the miracles of Jesus, but there will still be 
left the superhuman task of explaining him. 
Now while I believe in the miracles, I find it 
a little hard on my self-respect as a reasoning 
man, that anyone should suppose that I believe 
in Jesus because of the miracles! 

It sometimes appears to me that those who 
most scorn the miracles have never read the 
gospels carefully enough to discover how Jesus 
himself scorned them and the people who de- 
manded them. Faith, a spiritual function, 
should not have a material basis; faith becomes 
holy in exact proportion as it becomes free of 
all physical foundation. No one perceived this 
profound truth more clearly than Jesus him- 


THE SUPERNORMAL 119 


self. Jesus possessed a unique power over 
matter, a power which perhaps other men may 
some day attain, but the power of Jesus over 
spirit will remain forever solely his own. Jesus 
himself had precisely the same revulsion that 
the modern man feels at the idea of making 
faith dependent on any physical manifestation. 
Looking at the little circle of his friends, and 
desiring for them the holiest form of faith, and 
gazing down the vista of the coming centuries 
at all the obstacles that should stay his advance, 
Jesus employed his supernormal power with 
reluctance and with sad prevision that it would 
prove a stumbling block in all thoughtful ap- 
proach to him. Jesus had, however, his reasons 
for his miracles, and it is not the miracles, but 
the reasons, that have an essential revelation 
of the character of Jesus. A man might turn 
water into wine, but there is no logical connec- 
tion between such an action and nobility of 
soul. A Hindu juggler might perform such 
legerdemain, but it would be for a substantial 
reward; he could hardly be expected to lend all 
the resources of his art for anything so trivial 
as the relief of a host’s embarrassment at a tiny 


120 CHAOS AND A CREED 


village merrymaking. Nor is there any essen- 
tial spiritual significance in bringing the dead 
to life. I can perfectly well imagine a devil 
raising a dead man to life for purposes of his 
own, but [ cannot imagine a devil doing it with 
the sole purpose of restoring a boy to his heart- 
broken mother. It is because of the motives 
shining through his signs and wonders that 
there is in Jesus always majesty and never 
necromancy. 

I frankly admit that there are some few 
miracles that are puzzling because they appear 
meaningless, but in the flooding lhght of the 
beauty and significance of all the others, I can 
only feel that the account of the cursed fig tree 
and of the Gadarene swine must have been 
reported by observers who had entirely missed 
the most important details. Not that two or 
three miracles should have suffered in trans. 
mission, but that the great majority should 
have come down to us with such a wealth of 
background and of import, is the remarkable 
thing. Not only did Jesus have in view the 
universal significance of the particular miracle, 
but as often as he could hold his audience to 


THE SUPERNORMAL 121 


the necessary attention, he expounded that 
meaning in unforgetable words, so that, in his 
sure handling, the miracles become not crude 
attempts to coerce a crude faith, but rich sym- 
bols of spiritual truth; so handled, the miracles 
become parables, not spoken, but acted. 

To the end of time people will be question- 
ing whether or not Jesus was God, inhabiting 
for a brief time a human body. For the estab- 
lishment of his divinity his signs and wonders 
have always furnished a two-edged argument. 
Discussion has been fallible because it has con- 
centrated on the mere fact rather than on the 
manner of the performance. Whether or not 
Jesus was God, he performed his miracles, not 
as a man, but as God would have performed 
them. Jesus possessed a unique power over 
matter; whether or not that power was super- 
human, the occasions, when he refrained from 
using it show a superhuman self-denial, and 
the occasions when he used it show a super- 
human pity. It is not the times when Jesus 
performed miracles, but the times when he for- 
bade himself to perform them that reveal his 
divinity, and at the same time reveal the fiercest 


122 CHAOS AND A CREED 


and most constant temptation of all his short 
flaming passage across earthly history. Sup- 
pose Jesus had chosen to turn stones into loaves 
of bread, suppose he had chosen to rule all the 
world in obedience to the law of money rather 
than to the law of mercy, suppose he had chosen 
to cast himself from the temple pinnacle, sup- 
pose he had chosen to call down legions of 
angels against his murderers—would he have 
in the world to-day one worshiper? Our instant 
answer to that question is sufficient argument 
to show that it has never been the power of 
the miracles, but rather its manner of employ- 
ment, that has influenced people to reverence 
Jesus. 

So long as the miracles are for anyone mere 
signs and wonders, they engender either in- 
credulity or superstition. It is not until we 
follow Jesus, the healer, from village to village, 
observing him, listening to him, that some wit- 
ness deep within us cries, If God ever actually 
inhabited human flesh, precisely in this way 
would he have worked miracles. If God had 
chosen for a time to submit to every law he 
himself had imposed upon men for their 


THE SUPERNORMAL 123 


growth, then he would never have broken any 
of the lesser laws that govern our development, 
except in obedience to some higher law or- 
dained for our emancipation. He would break 
the physical order only for the sake of reveal- 
ing the spiritual order. God, walking the 
world, would know the peril of passing into 
history as a wonder-worker. But the miracles 
reveal an irrepressible kindness, bursting 
through all self-imposed restrictions. Jesus 
could conquer temptation and refrain from 
saving himself, but he could not refrain from 
saving others. Divine tenderness broke through 
the control he might have imposed upon his 
human hands, and coerced them to heal. But, 
always, divinely prescient, he foresaw the 
price he would have to pay in terms of doubt. 
He saw that to give life to the actual dead boy 
on the sheeted bier might be to conceal his gift 
of eternal life from future generations, for 
within a week people might be denying the act 
as a legend or a lie. But Jesus, looking far 
ahead into the eyes of his unborn comrades, 
hoped that there would always be those who 
would see not the mere marvel, but the burn- 


124 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ing pity back of it, and that these would not 
believe in the man because of his miracles, but 
in the miracles because of the man. 

When I try to imagine exactly what would 
be the effect on my own creed of Christ if the 
miracles were deleted from the gospel narra- 
tive, I discover, as one by one I think them 
over, that the loss of each would leave a curious 
gap. I try to disbelieve the raising of Lazarus, 
and I find my first thought is that then I should 
never again hear Jesus saying to every grief- 
stricken mourner, “He that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live.” I try 
to disbelieve the healing of the blind beggar, 
and I realize how I should miss those robust 
satiric words, ““Whether he be a sinner or no, 
I know not; one thing I know, whereas I was 
blind, now I see.”’ Deprived of that story, I 
should miss also its emphasis on Jesus’s supe- 
riority to a man-made Sabbath and to all man- 
made ecclesiasticism. Denying that incident, I 
should deny myself the privilege of observing 
Jesus always accomplishing his task of recrea- 
tion, transcending human times and seasons, 
as does God. I try to disbelieve the feeding of 


THE SUPERNORMAL 125 


the five thousand in the wilderness, and I feel 
how barren my conception of the world’s Christ 
would become if I could no longer hear him 
asserting, “I am the bread of life.” Thus I 
find that for myself the miracles are so inex- 
tricably intertwined with their significance that 
I cannot see at what point I could separate 
their physical aspect from their spiritual im- 
port, and the spiritual import of the miracles, I 
discover, is one of the firmest stones on which 
my faith is founded. As a mere exercise of 
credulity it is easier for me to believe that 
Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, than to 
believe that any merely human man, standing 
before all the mystery of death, and facing all 
the tragedy of grief, could have conceived of 
asserting, “I am the resurrection and the life.” 

Jesus, I believe, performed no act in his 
brief earth-life that could not serve to all eter- 
nity as an example and an incentive for the 
spiritual life of his followers, but to vitalize 
our imitation of Jesus it is necessary for us to 
incorporate the inner motive of his deeds rather 
than their external manifestation. Jesus’s acts, 
like his words, were necessarily subject to his 


126 CHAOS AND A CREED 


contemporary setting, and so neither words nor 
acts ean always be literally translated into the 
terms of later times. But the motives in which 
Jesus expressed himself have always been 
translatable into the ideals of every succeeding 
century. Jesus achieved wonders of healing 
by the laying on of hands. Medical science 
achieves its wonders to-day, but by no methods 
so immediate. Its technique is the fruit of long 
years of devotion, and of sacrifice sometimes 
of life itself. It is in terms of such selfless 
dedication to science that the ideals of the last 
hundred years have been expressed. Psychol- 
ogy as well as medicine has by the same slow 
laborious methods achieved to-day its wonders 
of healing. Now I could not believe in God 
at all if I did not believe that all human aspira- 
tion obeys a divinely ordered evolution, making 
the ideals of every age purposeful for God’s 
plans. There is no wastage in God’s schemes, 
and, therefore, the sternly scientific conscience 
of our era must have its import for our emerg- 
ing destiny. The events of history may repeat 
themselves, but the ideals of each period are 
its own, and never to be despised without some 


THE SUPERNORMAL 127 


loss to that period of its characteristic energy 
and resource. The idealism peculiar to our own 
era is scientific, but so basic and universal is 
the idealism of Jesus, that there has never been 
and will never be an era whose characteristic 
idealism could not be energized and recreated 
by his. This is the line of argument by which I 
arrive at my attitude toward the current in- 
terest in spiritual therapy. 

The crux of the discussion is whether or not 
the church of to-day has inherited, in literal- 
ness, Jesus’s power to heal. If so, it becomes 
incumbent on Christian clergy and on Chris- 
tian sects to imitate the method of Jesus’s mir- 
acles, expectant of his results. Common sense 
would admit at once that there are many dis- 
orders curable by purely spiritual methods, but 
in such a matter as smallpox the common sense 
of the common law would surely intervene with 
its purely physical methods, and the most de- 
voted Christians among us would accord it our 
approval. The most agnostic of doctors would 
probably grant that, whatever the disease, a 
patient is materially benefited by a conviction 
of God’s presence and of God’s desire for 


128 CHAOS AND A CREED 


recovery. What the agnostic doctor would not 
grant is that the doctor himself would be more 
benefited than the patient if he were actuated 
by those same convictions. Never, as I survey 
the long, painful progress of humanity, am I 
able to believe that any process so intelligent 
was shaped by chance, but if not by chance, 
then by God; there is no other alternative, and 
if our climb is God-directed, then there is pur- 
pose in the present-day reverence for science, 
and to deny science its exercise is to frustrate 
that purpose. God needs doctors or he would 
not have made them. Of all men walking this 
earth at this hour, doctors have the opportu- 
nity of following closest in Christ’s footsteps, 
for he was himself first a doctor, and never 
dreamed of preaching to a broken soul until 
he had restored its broken body. Jesus healed 
by methods that from the perspective of two 
thousand years appear inexplicable, and for 
that reason hardly to be safely adopted by 
modern men. But shining clear and splen- 
did for all time stand forth the motives of the 
miracles. In regard to the miracles of Jesus, 
as in every other aspect of his career, his own 


THE SUPERNORMAL 129 


words ring forever true, “The letter killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life.” The spirit of 
Jesus’s miracles is starkly lucid; he burned to 
relieve suffering, he sought to emancipate souls 
from physical crippling, and he wished to es- 
tablish faith in himself and his message. Such 
faith, he plainly saw, was not of the highest 
type, but could serve as starting point for 
growth. It is the spirit, not the letter, of his 
signs and wonders, that Jesus bequeathed to 
his followers. Whenever any man perceives 
back of the blazing pictorial language of 
Jesus, and back of his vivid dramatic actions, 
the inner significance of both, and makes that 
universal significance the object of his imita- 
tion, he is able to translate those words and 
actions into terms of his own decade and its 
own idealism, and thus to become personally 
energized for that individual spiritual adven- 
ture which is a condition of all racial progress. 
Just in proportion as a present-day scientist 
_ permits himself and his miracles to be inspired 
by that faith in God and that tenderness to 
man which characterized the miracles of Jesus, 
shall the promise of Jesus be made true in 


130 ‘CHAOS AND A CREED 


terms of our own time—“The works that I do 
shall ye do also, and greater works than these 
shall ye do.” 

To me the one miracle beyond any perad- 
venture of dispute that Jesus commanded men 
to perform is that of creating ourselves in his 
image—and this we cannot do until faith re- 
veals clearly that the miracle of his personality 
is the supreme miracle that explains and tran- 
scends all other miracles. 


Was His Birth Natural or Supernatural? 


As I endeavor, humble and puzzled, to 
thread my way to conviction through all the 
disputing and denying going on all about me, 
I discover one sure rock from which vantage 
I can always obtain perspective: I do not 
try to believe anything more than Jesus him- 
self asks me to believe. As one looks at the 
present fulminations of the press, it appears 
as if the Christian church might be torn in two 
by controversy over the manner of Jesus’s 
birth, and in all the noisy recrimination few 
people offer the quiet advice, “Look and see 
what Jesus himself says of his birth.” To look 


THE SUPERNORMAL 131 


would be to find that Jesus says not one single 
word. Had he no reason for his reticence? 
Does Jesus mean us to follow his example here 
and there, imitating this or that characteristic 
that attracts us, or does he mean us to follow 
it in all things? As a matter of fact we have 
always showed ourselves foolhardy and per- 
verse in picking and choosing just which quali- 
ties in Jesus to accept and which to reject. As 
to the manner of his human birth, Jesus was 
absolutely silent. If we truly reverence him, 
are we not bound to reverence that silence, 
whether or not we understand it? 

There is a swift way to test controversy if 
ever it grows noisy within our own brains, and 
if to-day press and pulpit would stop shouting 
long enough to listen, they, too, could hear the 
tones of Jesus, low, ironic, speaking always his 
clear solution. It is curious how instantly we 
know Jesus’s attitude toward any question, 
know it absolutely for one visioned moment 
before we turn away to argue and obscure it. 
This instancy of ours is the spontaneous wit- 
ness of our whole character to the wholeness 
of his. Contrasted with this crystal-clear re- 


132 CHAOS AND A CREED 


sponse of our personality to his, all conten- 
tious approach to him is a path dark with 
human sophistry and compromise. On this 
question of his birth, a question now so bit- 
terly mooted, which of us cannot hear Jesus 
speaking? For shall reverence ever assert that 
the accents of Jesus were silenced two thou- 
sand years ago, or ever deny that his most au- 
thentic speech has always been expressed not 
in words, but in terms of human aspiration? 
While his temples are clamorous with dogma, 
Jesus speaks in a different language: “If the 
manner of my birth had been an essential of 
faith, I would have told you plainly, for noth- 
ing needful for your knowledge or your wor- 
ship did I neglect to tell you. Of my birth I 
never spoke, but I called myself the Son of 
Man. I came and went on earth as Joseph’s 
son, contented. Did I ever demand that any 
man follow me out of deference to my birth? 
Look and see what it was I did demand, and 
be silent.” 

To neglect Jesus’s example in any respect 
may be to frustrate his purpose, a purpose 
revealed only to those who try in every respect 


THE SUPERNORMAL 133 


to imitate his conduct as the only way to ascer- 
tain his creed. Whenever we require of faith 
more than Jesus requires of it, we impose a 
human fetter upon a divine spontaneity, and 
thus distract ourselves from the real require- 
ments designed perhaps to carry us to some 
far unguessed emancipation. For any man to 
ask of his fellow-men more than Jesus himself 
asks is a curious assumption of pride, and the 
distance from pride to persecution is only a 
hair’s breadth. Those who were nearest to 
Jesus in his earth life did not preach about his 
birth; they preached about his resurrection. It 
might be well for the Christian church of the 
twentieth century to look at the Christian 
church of the first, and surmise what would 
have happened to our faith if the earliest Chris- 
tians had preached of the babyhood rather than 
of the manhood of Jesus. It really seems as if 
in the ecstasy of that risen presence standing 
beside them, Peter and Paul completely forgot 
the birth of Jesus. 

Jesus had, I am forced to believe, some 
divine reason for not basing his divinity on any 
physical phenomenon. He bases it on the spon- 


134 CHAOS AND A CREED 


taneous tribute of our personality to his. His 
eminence is divine, he never stooped to make it 
merely superhuman. The most courageous and 
most symbolic incident of his claim to Messiah- 
ship is that of the synagogue of Nazareth. 
Joseph’s son, the town carpenter, faces the 
people who have known him from infancy. His 
figure is as familiar and as little noted as the 
stones of the fountain where they go for water. 
Their soiled feet have trod the door sills he has 
fashioned, their grimy hands have lifted from 
their sweaty oxen the yokes that he has made. 
But now he stands before them, their fellow- 
man suddenly transfigured into a mystery. For 
the first time in his life the eyes of all are upon 
him. With a gesture of majesty, their carpen- 
ter selects from all their literature of prophecy 
the holiest hope of all, and reads it aloud. 
Calmly as a king might lift his hand, he returns 
the papyrus roll to its custodian and announces, 
“To-day is this Scripture fulfilled before your 
very eyes.” 

And at first, before dispute and doubt can 
enter them, their response to the divinity of 
his presence is instant, “For every man of them 


THE SUPERNORMAL 135 


accorded him belief, and astounded at the 
beauty of the words that proceeded from his 
lips, kept saying, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ ” 

But presently as he passed on to those aus- 
terities of faith that he demands of his fol- 
lowers, his audience flashed from reverence into 
scorn, they hurtled him forth from their wor- 
ship, and would have killed the Christ who had 
dared to be the town carpenter, but then, as 
now, Jesus passed through the mob that re- 
jected him, deathless God. 

It is in the light of that incident that I en- 
deavor to find my way through the controversy 
of the present. But while I try to make my 
own path lucid, I hesitate to trespass upon 
ground that for many people is too holy for 
any approach. To any man for whom the 
literal acceptance of the first and second chap- 
ters of Matthew and of Luke is essential to a 
belief in the divinity of Jesus, I can only say, 
nothing is farther from my intention than 
mere dispute. I can only repeat that for my- 
self I might be to-day as utterly ignorant of 
the story of his nativity as were his fellow- 


136 CHAOS AND A CREED 


townsmen, and still I should be convinced that 
the carpenter-Christ is God. 

There are lines of demarcation between mod- 
ernist and fundamentalist that go deeper into 
human psychology than any mere words or 
mere argument. If the church of Jesus is to 
be his in spirit as well as in letter, is it not 
possible for fundamentalist and modernist to 
stand together, since both alike accept his divin- 
ity? To believe him God’s son and to live in 
accordance with this belief are all that Jesus 
demands of his friends. Shall the Christian 
church ask more than that of its members? 
For the pitiful aspect of the dissension is that 
always to demand of each other requirements 
Jesus never made, is to neglect the require- 
ments he does make. For every Christian who 
insists that his fellow Christian shall believe 
Christ entered the world in a certain manner, 
there is somebody somewhere who, listening to 
the un-Christ-like wrangling of Christians, re- 
fuses to believe that Christ ever entered the 
world at all. While we loudly insist that Jesus 
was born under conditions that argue the direct 
intervention of God, we permit babies to be 


THE SUPERNORMAL 137 


born under conditions that argue the direct 
intervention of the devil. Will it never enter 
our foolish heads to see that Jesus himself made 
reverence for all humanity the first condition 
of reverence for his divinity ? 

The basic differences between fundamental- 
ist and modernist are psychological rather than 
doctrinal. Obviously the first distinction is the 
eternal one between the conservatism of the 
mass and the adventure of the individual. Con- 
servatism is just as essential to all sure prog- 
ress as is adventure. There will always be 
many sound and sturdy men and women who 
will never be able to put through their day’s 
task vigorously except as they feel that they 
have the age-old authority of church and state 
to reinforce their own thinking and acting. 
Unfortunately to-day all authority is being 
most cruelly sifted, and people who refuse to 
think for themselves run the risk of being tram- 
pled before the advance of new and strange 
opinions. 

The difference between fundamentalist and 
modernist runs deeper, however, than the cleav- 
age between conservatism and audacity. To 


138 CHAOS AND A CREED 


the fundamentalist it is inconceivable that there 
ean be a union of divinity with humanity except 
by the direct physical effect of the spirit of 
God upon the body of a woman, but to the 
modernist the incarnation is too stupendous a 
fact to be circumscribed to the human concep- 
tion of a superhuman event. Neither biologist 
nor chemist has ever yet explained how the life 
principle everywhere in evidence is able to 
impregnate physical matter. So long as that 
daily miracle goes unexplained, the miracle of 
an immaculate conception is defensible. Rec- 
ognizing the miracles of life all about him, the 
modernist freely grants to the fundamentalist 
that the physical explanation of Jesus’s divin- 
ity may be literally true, but for himself, the 
modernist believes in that divinity for a dif- 
ferent reason. 

As a builder of my own working creed, my 
own conclusions are the same as those quoted 
in a recent copy of the Hwpository Times of 
Edinburgh that “the story of the Virgin birth 
is so demonstrably a late intrusion into the life 
of Jesus, so manifestly legendary in construc- 
tion and withal so unessential to the Christian 


THE SUPERNORMAL 139 


faith, that it has been abandoned by the ma- 
jority of unprejudiced scholars.” 

Nothing, however, is farther from my inten- 
tion than any irreverence toward any faith that 
is inextricably intertwined with the literal ac- 
ceptance of chapters divine in their beauty and 
in their witness to the nature of God and of 
man. While to my own mind these early chap- 
ters are as separate in character from the rest 
of the gospel story as they are separate in 
sequence, I freely admit that if they are leg- 
endary, their events were conceived by minds 
so imbued with the character and teaching of 
Jesus that even legend was coerced to a sub- 
limity in keeping with the sublimity of that 
deathless presence. 

The wordless beasts in their stable, the 
wordless shepherds, dumb with wonder, the 
mysterious astrologers from unknown foreign 
lands, the anthem bursting forth from out the 
spirit world, all focusing all worship on the 
miracle of a new-born baby—the narrative of 
the first Christmas is the most beautiful story 
of birth ever written. Its sheer simplicity, its 
utter purity, stagger the intellect to account 


140 CHAOS AND A CREED 


for. I frankly envy those who can believe it 
literally, and yet, for myself, in view of the 
fact that his nativity is never mentioned by 
Jesus nor by any of the first preachers of his 
message, I have come to believe the story pro- 
foundly symbolic, making every mother the 
physical vessel to receive the mysterious gift 
of life, making every father the steward of 
that gift, making every baby a holy child. Is 
it not possible for the fundamentalist to let 
me regard the story of Jesus’s birth in this 
way? Is this way of regarding it one whit less 
reverent, less holy, than his own? 

It is far easier, it appears to me, for the 
modernist to understand the attitude of the 
fundamentalist than for the latter to under- 
stand the modernist. In all the controversy, it 
is the fundamentalist who asks that other men 
believe as he does, while the modernist merely 
asks to be allowed to think for himself. The 
pitiful part of it all is that even if every Chris- 
tian should this very day cease from every 
activity that Jesus commanded, and devote 
himself wholly to argument, not if this argu- 
ment were continued to the end of time, could 


THE SUPERNORMAL 141 


either religion or science, forced to go back 
twenty centuries, ever establish any proofs to 
support either side of the contention. 

Jesus himself resolutely separated his claims 
from any proof but that of personal witness 
to his power. Jesus himself never established 
his divinity on any foundation so precarious as 
that of physical miracle. All physical miracle is 
limited to a date and a place, and therefore 
will always be disputed by people of a later 
period and a distant region. But personality 
is an indestructible argument. Personality, as 
Jesus embodies it in himself, and as he inspires 
it in others, is evidence open for anybody’s ex- 
amination in all places and in all times. The 
incarnation as a physical miracle will always 
be susceptible to dispute, and the modernist 
regards it as therefore less energizing than his 
own. It is one of the noble audacities of pres- 
ent-day thought to believe that faith, in order 
to have its finest power to spiritualize, should 
rest on a purely spiritual foundation. Not 
Jesus’s birth, revealed in a book two thousand 
years ago, but Jesus’s character, revealed in 


142 CHAOS AND A CREED 


incessant resurrections all about us in the 
world to-day, is the proof of his divinity. 

To dispute at what exact moment in the 
span of Jesus’s earth existence the divine en- 
tered into possession of his human body, 
whether before his birth, or in his babyhood, or 
in his boyhood, or in his manhood, appears pro- 
foundly unessential before the fact of such pos- 
session. Does the exact moment of God’s en- 
trance into man either make or mar the incar- 
nation? The difficulty for many minds is to 
account for a sinless man with a human pa- 
ternity. But possibly the conception of such a 
possibility is itself divine, possibly only God 
could have reverenced his creation so deeply 
as to believe a man, wholly human in every 
physical way, capable of embodying his own 
godhead. It is not Jesus who says that babies 
are conceived and born in sin, although he did 
say to an old man, a Pharisee, that he needed 
to be reborn, of the spirit. 

This explanation of my faith would be 
worthless for my own clarification if at any 
point it should fail to be completely honest. I 
therefore state frankly that for myself I try 


THE SUPERNORMAL 143 


to approach Jesus as his contemporaries ap- 
proached him. Whatever his reasons, he chose 
to appear to his friends as the son of Joseph 
and Mary, a peasant carpenter, one of a large 
family of brothers and sisters. If there had 
been any hint of shame about his birth his 
enemies would have used it against him, where- 
as the most they find to say of his origin and 
antecedents is not that these are in any doubt, 
but that they are too well known, too usual, 
too normal. It is impossible for me to omit 
from the foundations of my faith such a pas- 
sage as that of the seventh chapter of John: 


Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but 
when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is. 
Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught saying, 
Ye both know me and ye know whence I am. 


For myself I find this stumbling block in 
the conception of a supernatural birth: as the 
chief argument for his other miracles is, to me, 
that they are a revelation of his character, so, 
contrariwise, to make his birth a miracle would 
be, for my own path to belief, a denial of his 
character. As I see Jesus, he is God submit- 


144 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ting to every human handicap. Unless he was 
in all points tempted like as we are, he has no 
power to help us against temptation. If he 
did not have an earthly father, he escaped half 
our patrimony of weakness. ‘To me—merely 
one man looking at Jesus in history and at 
Jesus in the world to-day—the god-man 
stands before us fearlessly and completely 
human before he dares to assert that he is 
divine. He bases his divinity not on the manner 
of his creation, but on his power to recreate us. 
Whatever his followers, whether right or 
wrong, have claimed for him, Jesus himself 
with a humility and with a purpose beyond 
human imagination chooses to stand before 
the world, not as impossible, but as the per- 
fection of possibility. 


Did He, or Did He Not, Manifest Himself 
After Death? 


Perhaps I have already said too often, or 
perhaps I have not said often enough, that in 
this book I am not trying to convince others, 
but merely trying to make clear, first to my- 
self, and then to those others, the reasons why 


THE SUPERNORMAL 145 


I am myself convinced. Facing now the pri- 
mary article of the Christian creed, I say that 
I believe in the fact of the resurrection, first 
because of the effect of that fact on the men 
of Jesus’s own time, and then on the men of 
our own time. Further, I credit the incidents 
narrated of Jesus’s return not because of the 
mere miracle, but because of the miraculously 
consistent motive of each appearance. And 
as a third reason I believe in the fact of Jesus's 
resurrection because of its harmony with the 
facts of an indomitable life energy revealed 
everywhere in the world around me. The res- 
urrection of Jesus is the cardinal article of the 
Christian creed, but there is no article for which 
the gap between creed and conduct has proved 
so destructive, no article which if permitted its 
full application might become so potent. 
When I say that I believe in the fact because 
of its effect, I mean that an amazing result 
implies an amazing cause, and I mean that it 
is absolutely impossible for my mind to grant 
that the early disciples were men with the cour- 
age to preach or the imagination to invent so 
sublime a lie as the resurrection of Jesus—if it 


146 CHAOS AND A CREED 


was a lie! It appears to be easy enough for 
rationalists to get rid of the resurrection by 
saying that the disciples invented it and then 
went joyously to martyrdom in defense of their 
own invention, but it is impossible for my own 
brain to get rid of the resurrection by any such 
light dismissal. There have been unnumbered 
instances in history when men chose the stake 
in defense of what they believed to be the truth, 
but I fail to recall one instance in which they 
chose the stake in defense of what they knew 
to be a lie. Our whole theory of the third 
degree rests on the premise that no man can 
endure torture very long unless he has truth 
to support him, and all protest that such meth- 
ods of inquisition are fallible rests on the cog- 
nate premise that even with truth to support 
him many a man cannot endure torture, and 
so to escape it makes a false confession. In 
saying that the first missionaries invented the 
resurrection, materialists presuppose for them 
such a degree of innate courage as I have never 
yet seen exemplified in any man, dead or living, 
and for which I can find no scintilla of evidence 
in the gospel record, and the gospel record 


THE SUPERNORMAL 147 


is the only evidence revealing the characters of 
Jesus’s chosen promulgators. It would be 
pretty hard to prove them before the resurrec- 
tion as men showing any signs of bravery. 
Every one of his followers ran away when 
Jesus was arrested. T'wo of them came steal- 
ing back later, and of those two, one knew him- 
self to be protected by his high connections, 
and the other, at the first hint of danger to 
himself, swore that he had never known Jesus. 
Immediately after the execution of their leader 
we find the little band huddled behind locked 
doors in deadly fear. At best they had been 
only a little group of rustics, bewildered in a 
cruel city, held together by the force of their 
master’s personality. When he went from 
them, they were paralyzed by despair and 
dread. Look at them as the gospels show them 
—very unusual material out of which to make 
martyrs! The moment the chroniclers give as 
the first to illustrate courage is in itself incred- 
ible. The disciples have just seen their leader 
hanging in shameful death. At that moment 
the most natural thing was that Jesus’s words, 
intrusted to men so craven and doubtful, should 


148 CHAOS AND A CREED 


have died with him. Really something must 
have happened between that midnight when 
Peter, standing in the flickering firelight and 
ominous shadows of the high priest’s hall, 
cursed and swore, saying, “I know not this 
man of whom ye speak,” and that morning six 
weeks later when with the eleven he stood in 
the hostile streets of Jerusalem and cried, ““This 
Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
witnesses!” 

The chief argument that Jesus was able to 
convince his friends of his return to life is that 
they have been able to convince other people. 
Unless Jesus survived death during the forty 
days succeeding his execution, there is no way 
to account for his surviving death to-day. If 
Jesus had not risen from the tomb, the Chris- 
tian church would have died before it was born, 
at the cross. Jesus exists in this present hour 
not through the power of myth, nor through 
the power of miracles, nor because of the man- 
ner of his birth. Unless his followers had be- 
lieved in his restoration to life, we should never 
have heard of him, for not one sermon would 
have been preached, not one gospel would have 


THE SUPERNORMAL 149 


been written. The resurrection is the only way 
to account for the Christian faith. Nothing 
short of Jesus’s return from the dead could 
have transformed the unstable, cowardly fisher- 
man, Peter, the scoffing, cruel Pharisee, Paul, 
into the most intrepid missionaries known to 
history. Peter and Paul, before they believed 
Jesus risen from the grave, may appear fanatic 
and foolish, but afterward they possess an enig- 
matic force, as if recreated in a new character. 
Looked at as they pass down the pages of the 
chronicle, they do not any longer appear to 
any honest observer as fanatic or foolish. They 
seem to have been remade overnight. They 
appear to possess a blazing eloquence, a keen 
wit, an invincible Joyousness, a tireless energy; 
above all, they appear to be men enviably 
fearless. 

I believe in the fact of the resurrection be- 
cause of its effect not alone on the disciples of 
A.D. 33, but because of the even more enig- 
matic effect of the resurrection of to-day upon 
the men of to-day. From A.D. 33 to 1925 the 
people who have spread the principles of Jesus 
have been the people who have believed an 


150 CHAOS AND A CREED 


actual person, transcending all dissolution, 
stood beside them. The men who to-day per- 
ceive, against all the blackness of despair and 
bewilderment, the risen Jesus before their very 
eyes, are to-day his only witnesses, and they are 
as far outnumbered as were Peter and Paul 
among the shifty, cynical Greeks, among the 
sturdy, cynical Romans. Always it is the utter 
audacity of such believers that wins attention, 
their audacity and their astounding joyous- 
ness, like that of flowers, bubbling up golden 
through black winter soil. Always the men 
who are themselves convinced of Jesus’s resur- 
rection, convince, not because of what they say, 
but because of what, in the emancipation of 
that belief, they have become. 

To preach Jesus at all in that period imme- 
diately following the resurrection, a period 
black with the animosity both of Jews and of 
Gentiles, required a bravery to which the gos- 
pel record gives no previous clue, but those first 
disciples dared more than merely preach Jesus; 
they elected out of all the material they had in 
store precisely that one aspect which of all was 
least likely to win credence. They not only 


THE SUPERNORMAL 151 


dared to preach to a hostile audience, but they 
dared to preach precisely the fact which that 
audience was least likely to accept. To the 
very faces of those Jews and Romans who had 
just crucified Jesus they blared the news that 
he had come back from the grave. ‘They made 
the most difficult tenet in Christian theology the 
first tenet that all converts must acknowledge, 
and they made no divergence from this auda- 
cious emphasis, as the years went on and the 
new strange religion made its sure, humble ad- - 
vance from the slave markets and the cata- 
combs up and up until it possessed imperial 
Rome. ‘There must have been some curious 
reason why the early Christians made the most 
difficult article of their faith their one incessant 
theme. It was a foolhardy practice, and they 
joyfully paid the price of butchery in the 
Roman arena. They risked hostility to their 
creed instantly because they dared to appear 
as madmen, asserting an absurd, unheard-of 
phenomenon. ‘There were many milder ways 
of spreading new doctrine. The Greeks and 
Romans were not averse to new cults; they 
liked them, but they liked them to be a little 


152 CHAOS AND A CREED 


plausible. They did not enjoy being insulted 
with impossibilities. Can anyone suppose the 
compatriots of Pilate or of Juvenal were su- 
perstitious people? Can anyone suppose the 
compatriots of Demetrius, the EKphesian jew- 
eler, or of Lucian, were easily duped? The bet- 
ter one knows the Greeks and Romans, the 
more congenially modern do they appear. 
They were not one bit readier to believe that a 
man can return to life from death than we are 
to-day. If the first missionaries had so chosen, 
they could anywhere throughout the blasé pa- 
gan world have found an audience as willing to 
listen pleasantly and politely to the Sermon on 
the Mount, as Chicago to-day, in a comfort- 
ably upholstered temple, would listen to Baha- 
ism. If the first Christians had not insisted on 
asserting incredible events, they would not 
have been thrown into the arena; they would 
have been invited to dine. But instead, always 
and everywhere, in season and out, as the first 
fact and the last of their religion, they taught 
the resurrection. It is very hard for my com- 
mon sense to believe that such courage and 


THE SUPERNORMAL 153 


such pertinacity could exist in men debilitated 
by the consciousness that they were lying. 
Deception, however, it can be instantly sug- 
gested, may not be conscious, may not be cul- 
pable. The disciples merely experienced hal- 
lucination. An easy solution of a strange mys- 
tery, but a solution too quick and plausible for 
my own acceptance. Mary and Peter, and then 
two men together, and eleven men together, 
and five hundred men together, all at different . 
times and in different places, had all of them 
exactly the same hallucination, saw, all of them, 
exactly the same person? And the effect on 
every several beholder was precisely the same 
—no panic, no hysteria. They seem each to pass 
at the instant of recognition into a new condi- 
tion of being, utterly emancipated by the peace 
and joy and energy of their conviction. It is 
argued in support of the hallucination theory 
that the disciples of Jesus expected his return 
from the grave, and, being in a state of ex- 
pectation, easily believed the impossible. Care- 
fully studying the mood of the disciples, I 
can find no smallest evidence that they ever 
dreamed that Jesus would come back from the 


154 CHAOS AND A CREED 


dead. Jesus promised again and again that he 
would rise on the third day, but I can discover 
no sign that his disciples understood the words. 
They seem, like many other of his sayings, to 
have touched their ears, but not their under- 
standing. ‘The despairing group portrayed at 
the last meal together, the trembling band 
gathered on the evening of the first Easter, 
Mary blind with tears at the sepulcher, Cleopas 
and his friend utterly disconsolate in their be- 
wilderment—it is extremely difficult to visual- 
ize any of these as hopeful and expectant! 
There were people who had listened when Jesus 
said he would return, had listened and remem- 
bered, but these were hardly people to spread 
a report of his restoration. While his friends 
show no sign that they heard or remembered 
Jesus’s promise to come back to them, the 
crafty Pharisees took precautions to have the 
tomb sealed. It was, of course, not the resur- 
rection of his body but of his influence that 
they feared. History has justified their fear! 

There are certain aspects of the hallucina- 
tion hypothesis which make it for my own mind 
singularly difficult to receive. There is some- 


THE SUPERNORMAL 155 


thing unique in any hallucination in which two 
men at once, or eleven men at once, or five hun- 
dred men at once, see exactly the same person. 
To do this the two men, or the eleven, or the 
five hundred would have to have precisely the 
same mental receptivity, and that receptivity 
at that moment would have to be, among all 
of them, at precisely the same degree of vigor. 
Such ideal conditions seem to me unthinkable. 
The possibility is sometimes advanced that, 
granted not all the men of a given group actu- 
ally beheld the vision of their risen master, one 
or two of them did imagine they saw him, and 
the contagion of their fancy spread to all the 
rest, by thought transference pure and simple. 
It is always a surprising thing for my own 
sense of logic that any materialist should ever 
employ for any purpose whatever the argu- 
ment of telepathy. In the first place, the exist- 
ence of telepathy is not yet admitted by sci- 
ence; it is generally granted that sound-waves 
or light-waves traveling through the air may 
carry information from one man to another, 
but there is no general admission that thought- 
waves can do this. Thought transference is 


156 CHAOS AND A CREED 


debatable ground, therefore by its very ety- 
mology forbidden for the use of debate. In the 
second place, as has been shown by Frederic 
Myers, if telephathy should ever become an 
accepted fact, it would invalidate all the 
foundations of materialist philosophy, because 
the moment you admit non-physical communi- 
cation between any two minds, you open up the 
possibility of other non-physical activities for 
all minds, and approach the perilous hypothe- 
sis of a complete non-physical existence for any 
mind. Obviously if you once admit that an 
intelligence is able to act independently of its 
physical mechanism, you at once suggest that 
it might be able to exist independently of its 
physical mechanism. The foundation of ma- 
terialism is that the spirit cannot live without 
a body. On this premise, Jesus, after death, 
could not have manifested himself to his 
friends. Materialists, therefore, deny the res- 
urrection, but explain it as an hallucination. 
So long as they restrict themselves solely to 
the hallucination theory, I grant their position 
comprehensible, but the moment they over- 
step, and introduce the possibility of thought 


THE SUPERNORMAL 157 


transference, I deny their right to this argu- 
ment. For myself, I find the whole hypothesis 
of an illusion—an illusion fondly credited and 
widely disseminated—untenable because I do 
not believe there has ever been hallucination so 
powerful as to create cowards into heroes in 
six weeks’ time, and so enduring as to persist 
in its effect throughout all the centuries re- 
quired to establish a new religion in a hostile 
environment—a religion so naive as to appear 
on the surface, repellently superstitious, a reli- 
gion so exacting in actual practice as to be, 
both to the pagan world and our own, always 
repellently austere. I know no way to account 
for the fact that the Christian faith is still 
alive to-day after all the death blows of two 
thousand years, except by the fact that its 
founder rose from death to life two thousand 
years ago. 

Believing in the fact of the resurrection pri- 
marily because of the effect of that fact, I 
cannot believe that men who were either guilty 
of conscious deceit, or innocently duped by 
mere illusion, would ever have had either the 
bravery or the visioned efficiency required to 


158 CHAOS AND A CREED 


establish a new religion, but for another reason 
also I reject the view that the return of Jesus 
to life is a fabrication. To make so stupendous 
a lie convincing would have required great 
powers of invention and imagination at the 
start, and afterward the greatest skill and cau- 
tion to sustain it intact through centuries. 
Looking at the characters of the disciples as 
the gospels portray them, I wonder which 
would be harder to substantiate from the actual 
account, that they were men by nature cou- 
rageous enough to preach an impossibility, or 
men by nature endowed with the imagination 
to conceive, or the art to paint, those resurrec- 
tion pictures that have become part of the lit- 
erary heritage of the world. It may be possible 
to deny that Jesus rose from the dead, but no- 
body who has ever read the final chapters of 
each gospel can ever afterward forget Mary 
sobbing at an empty tomb, the boy John, kneel- 
ing and peering in at grave clothes mysteri- 
ously tossed aside, at One seated by a pungent 
beach fire where fish are broiling, and saying, 
“Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” Pic- 
tures that hung forever in the gallery of the 


THE SUPERNORMAL 159 


world’s memory. But who conceived such pic- 
tures, who painted them? Galilean fisher-folk ? 
Not all the intellect of Athens, not all the art 
of Florence, has given us pictures that bite 
into the memory like those! 

But the resurrection appearances do not fit 
together with exactness. You cannot give the 
incidents of the first Easter Sunday moment 
by moment, with precision. Do men and women 
swept by sudden ecstasy of unbelievable joy 
remember every detail as does a scientist dis- 
secting a brain? Do they gather together after- 
ward in conference and tabulate their data 
with precision? Or is their impulse to rush 
forth and shout their gladness to their heart- 
sick comrades? Liars and fabricators are never 
so incautious as were the first heralds of Jesus’s 
resurrection. They were incapable of arrang- 
ing their evidence like a lawyer’s brief. They 
stood forth, blazing with conviction, and flung 
their unbelievable news into the teeth of their 
persecutors. If they had remained the dead- 
ened cowards they had been, they might have 
remembered the dusty scholarship that would 
one day hunt down the discrepancies of their 


160 CHAOS AND A CREED 


accounts, but for themselves, they had seen a 
dead man live, and had themselves become 
alive. 

It is the strange harmony of the resurrec- 
tion narratives that is far more difficult to ex- 
plain than their inconsistencies. The disciples 
were familiar with the extravagant apocalyptic 
literature popular in their day; if they had 
invented the return of Jesus, they would natu- 
rally have pictured him in a blaze of splendor 
and power such as they had expected of the 
Messiah he had once claimed to be. Instead, 
Jesus returns simply, unobtrusively, a gar- 
dener, plodding to his work in the early dawn, 
a solitary fisherman upon the beach at sun- 
rise, a fellow pedestrian met along the highway 
on an afternoon’s walk—as convincing in his 
everyday humanness as if he had never tasted 
death; yet different, in ways hard for his nar- 
rators to describe, and harder for students to 
explain. But always in every incident the same 
Jesus he had been before. While now he is seen 
to break or obey physical laws at his pleasure, 
he never breaks the law of his own personality. 

Just as the miracles are credible because of 


THE SUPERNORMAL 161 


their spiritual significance, so the resurrection 
narratives are credible because of their fidelity 
to the character of Jesus. Not one incident re- 
counted blurs that character by one slightest 
earthy touch; not one word or action of the 
risen Jesus is by the slightest stroke out of 
drawing. Could human invention have accom- 
plished such a feat of sheer artistry as to make 
the portrait of Jesus after death the absolute 
complement, down to the tiniest detail, of the 
portrait of Jesus before death? The two are 
companion pictures each needing the revela- 
tion of the other. To comfort, to inspire, 
whether before his crucifixion or after, those 
are the two sustaining motives of Jesus’s exist- 
ence. Those two motives are clear in every one 
of the resurrection appearances. If men had 
fabricated the return of a god to earth after 
being slain, could they have made that god 
so human? Always the perfect humanity of 
Jesus, before death and after, shines out as 
itself superhuman. If men had merely imag- 
ined the return of Jesus, surely they would in 
some incident have betrayed fantasies of mir- 
acle and self-display, and grossnesses of mere 


162 CHAOS AND A CREED 


might. Instead, the miraculous element in 
_Jesus’s resurrection actions is marked by the 
same divine self-restraint that characterizes his 
earlier earth-life. Still he walks obedient to 
two motives—to comfort, to inspire—thus to 
make men fearless creators of themselves. Re- 
membering a meal which they had eaten to- 
gether heavy with foreboding, Jesus comes 
back again to share a meal in joy; remember- 
ing one who once had exclaimed, “Let us go 
with him that we may also die with him,” Jesus 
stretched to Thomas hands healed but still wit- 
nessing to sacrificial love; remembering a 
woman he had once freed from torture, in the 
mystery of the pulsing dawn he calls her again 
to hope, in the same sure voice speaking to her 
by her own name. If the resurrection of Jesus 
had been the invention of men, he would have 
been shown as dumfounding his enemies, but 
that would have been to convince by force and 
thus to abrogate his method of creation. If 
the resurrection of Jesus was the invention of 
God, he would have been shown as reassuring 
his friends, for that would be to convince by 


THE SUPERNORMAL 163 


love, and thus to vindicate his method of re- 
creating men into his own image. 

If Jesus had not come back with the same 
individuality, there would have been small 
purpose in his coming back at all. Survival 
in a new character is not survival, and would 
have been meaningless for his associates, leav- 
ing them bewildered and unawakened. The 
thought of mere prolongation of existence is 
not stimulating, but paralyzing, for why strug- 
gle as we do for the freedom of our person- 
ality, if all of it, in utter wastage, is to be struck 
from us at the portal of death? If Jesus, com- 
ing back to them, had not convinced his de- 
spairing friends that the after-existence is one 
of joyous activity, activity lucid at last and 
free of handicap, then the influence upon them 
of his resurrection becomes inexplicable. End- 
less existence in a barren universe, endless ex- 
istence in a universe of exhaustless adventure, 
the difference between the two conceptions is 
illustrated by the difference between the Laza- 
rus of Andreyev, and the Lazarus of Brown- 
ing. Jesus’s resurrection would never have 
transformed his followers from craven despair 


164 CHAOS AND A CREED 


to uttermost daring if it had not convinced 
them of two facts, that he was the same friend 
after death that he had been before, that he 
was still joyously active in human affairs. His 
disciples, having seen him, rushed forth fear- 
less and joyful with their tidings, certain that 
now at last their master walked inseparably 
beside them, forever unmenaced by death. 
J esus’s return either as a flickering ghost shape 
or as a flesh-and-blood actuality would have 
been nothing if he had not come back with 
his old tenderness, his old stimulus. Jesus’s 
return could never have motivated his church 
with an unbelievable energy and kept that 
church living until to-day if he had not come 
back to his friends, unquenchably himself. 
The consistency of the character of Jesus 
after death with the character of Jesus before 
death is the astounding element in the resur- 
rection narrative, utterly surpassing the mir- 
acle of physical manifestation. If I accept the 
miraculous persistence of Jesus’s personality, 
as revealed in incident after incident of inef- 
fable tenderness, then it is as a mere corollary 
to such marvel that I can credit the phenomena 


THE SUPERNORMAL 165 


of his manifestations. As I look at the portrait 
of Jesus painted in his four brief biographies, 
it seems to me that his disciples were as inca- 
pable of inventing the character revealed after 
his return as they were of inventing the char- 
acter revealed before his crucifixion. The weld- 
ing of the two characters into a perfect unity is, 
to me, an achievement transcending human 
power. 

There is but one incontrovertible evidence of 
Jesus’s resurrection, but it is the evidence that 
his church and its members have oftenest de- 
nied him. It is the survival of his motives that 
establishes his own survival. It is his power 
to vitalize personality that proves the inde- 
structible persistence of his own personality. 
The mere externalities of the resurrection are 
nothing as compared with the fact that only by 
coming back to life himself could he have en- 
franchised his followers to life. The bitterness 
with which we argue the validity of the miracles 
invalidates their motives, the hostility with 
which we discuss the physical aspect of the in- 
carnation contradicts the divinity of its pur- 
pose, and the obstinacy with which we try to 


166 CHAOS AND A CREED 


establish the resurrection of Jesus’s body denics 
to him the resurgence of his spirit. Jesus would 
to-day be lying sealed within the tomb of ob- 
livion if his first followers had sought to win 
credence by what they said, rather than by what 
they were. Peter did not testify; he was testi- 
mony. Paul did not preach; he was a sermon. 

All discussion of the nature of Jesus’s risen 
body is empty, all argument from this that our 
risen bodies will be precisely like his is futile, 
for both alike are as incapable of proof as is 
the exact manner in which Jesus first assumed 
that body made by his divinity sacredly human. 
While we dispute with what manner of lips the 
risen Jesus partook of food and drink, we 
forget that the words those lips spoke were, 
“Peace be unto you.” While we scrutinize 
pierced palms and side, we forget that the 
hands held toward 'Thomas proved Jesus’s gen- 
tleness toward honest doubt; while we argue 
the aspect of Jesus, the gardener, we forget 
ourselves to speak to the grief-stricken his glad 
assurance, “Woman, why weepest thou?” All 
that we need to know in order to recreate our- 
selves men as fearless as Peter and Paul, Jesus 


THE SUPERNORMAL 167 


left established beyond all dispute. The essen- 
tial fact of his resurrection is that he came 
back to his friends after burial in a reality so 
absolute as to transfigure them from dead de- 
spair to invincible courage and incredible capac- 
ity. The story of Jesus’s presence upon earth 
is a story as yet hardly more than begun. It is 
as true to-day as it was twenty centuries ago, 
that his friends are the only authentic wit- 
nesses of his resurrection. 

Always I am forced to search for evidence 
in support of my faith not alone in the written 
testament, but in the larger scripture of life 
spread all about me, a scripture which like 
most men I can read only falteringly, and with 
constant apology to others more confident of 
their own method of deciphering. As I turn 
from written Scripture to unwritten, I am fur- 
ther impressed by the superhuman elements in 
the resurrection account, for it does not seem 
to me that mere men could have unerringly 
selected for emphasis precisely those principles 
best fitted to vitalize an individual, or a creed, 
or a church. Jesus’s resurrection appears to 
me to be superhumanly conceived because of 


168 CHAOS AND A CREED 


its superhuman accord with the laws of life 
energy to be everywhere observed. Whether 
viewed symbolically or literally, the story of 
the nativity has always emphasized the sacred- 
ness of all birth, of all life. In like manner the 
story of the resurrection has always emphasized 
the indomitability, the indestructibility, of all 
Hie; 

Evolution is a curiously mooted word, for 
the people who deny its truth would be put to 
it to define the term, and the people who accept 
its truth would be even more puzzled to eluci- 
date its full connotation for their personal phi- 
losophy. Yet clearly to formulate for them- 
selves that connotation might perhaps be to 
discover some light on a path out of chaos 
toward a creed. For myself, as I gaze far 
back at the first amoeba, and follow from the 
primordial ooze the slow climb of humanity, up 
and up, until it attains the multiple thought 
processes of a Socrates, of a Dante, I seem to 
watch two principles ceaselessly active—life 
forever conquering death, and differentiation 
steadily imposing itself upon the inchoate. 
Looking back, one sees life again and again 


THE SUPERNORMAL 169 


cast down and buried, but always ultimately 
emergent, in subtler, stranger forms, perhaps, 
but always active and triumphant. Side by side 
with the persistence of the life energy one sees 
its incessant urge to new shapes, so that every 
leaf, every insect, every animal, every man, 
stands forth unique, apart from all others. At 
the far beginning of the climb is mere proto- 
plasm, holding all its pregnant possibilities, 
and at our end human personality, still perhaps 
only half emergent, still perhaps only half 
created. The men and women that we see to- 
day, the men and women that we are to-day, 
are perhaps no farther removed from the pri- 
mordial amoeba than from that ultimate man 
lying still incurled within the womb of human 
destiny. 

It is strange that the word evolution should 
cause us to look backward toward our origin, 
rather than impel us to look forward toward 
our future. If the backward view reveals life 
forever indestructible and differentiation as 
the ceaseless principle of that life, then the 
forward view should reveal unguessed possi- 
bilities of those two principles, once we possess 


170 CHAOS AND A CREED 


the courage to release their baffled power. If 
God two thousand years ago, chose to reveal 
his own soul to the souls of men by incorporat- 
ing in one individual the full possibilities of 
human individuality, then it would have been 
natural that the earth existence of that indi- 
vidual should illustrate and obey the universal 
laws ordained for human growth. There is no 
more evidence for the crucifixion than for the 
resurrection, but no one denies it because, still 
handicapped as we are by primordial fear, we 
believe the facts of death and cruelty, but 
doubt the facts of life and kindness. The his- 
tory of humanity shows his crucifixion as wit- 
ness to the beast from which we sprang; his 
resurrection is witness to the man we shall 
become. 


Chapter VII: The Autobiography 
of Jesus 


HROUGHOUT this book, so far I have been 

trying to make clear to myself the ques- 
tion, why do I believe in Jesus? There is a 
second question to make clear, who is this Jesus 
I believe in? I have no right to state a creed 
until [ have stated its Christ. In the effort to 
obtain a fresh angle of observation upon an 
old but ageless subject, I have come to regard 
the strangely persistent influence of Jesus 
upon human history as being, in essence, an 
autobiography. 


Why Did Not Jesus Write? 


Why did not Jesus write? A magazine arti- 
cle not long ago asked this question. That 
Jesus could have written, had he so desired, in 
either Greek or Aramaic, is a fact that becomes 

171 


172 CHAOS AND A CREED 


more evident, the more we know of him and of 
his time. The general illiteracy of Jesus’s asso- 
ciates and surroundings is an aspect that has 
been much overemphasized, and a misconcep- 
tion that present-day scholarship is doing much 
to correct. Archzological discovery within the 
last quarter-century has bared authoritatively 
the everyday life of those everyday people to 
whose ranks Jesus belonged. To quote one of 
the foremost contemporary scholars: “The dis- 
coveries of Greek papyri made in Egypt in 
the past twenty-five years, have put into our 
hands a mass of materials actually contem- 
porary with the New Testament, and written 
in the common Greek of its day. These pri- 
vate documents—letters, wills, deeds, con- 
tracts, petitions, reports, accounts, receipts, 
and memoranda—throw a flood of light upon 
New Testament life.” If ordinary people in 
Egypt employed writing for all practical pur- 
poses as we employ it to-day, so must the Gali- 
leans have done, for Galilee, with all its cru- 
dity, was a thoroughfare of the nations, influ- 
enced by all contacts. The village carpenter 
of Nazareth, like the villagers of his contem- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 1738 


porary Egypt, had all the facilities of writing 
ready to his hand. Yet Jesus left us no written 
word. Surely no one can read the gospels 
and not realize that their hero, that actual his- 
toric preacher-carpenter, had a surpassing lit- 
erary endowment. [rom more aspects than 
our feeble sympathies shall ever grasp, Jesus’s 
life is a record of inexorable self-control im- 
posed upon an impetuous nature. Theman who 
instinctively as a homing bird climbed the near- 
est mountain for prayer, might have left to 
us what raptured visions of dawnbreak and 
morning! ‘The man who listened to the wind as 
to a spirit brushing the ear as it passes from 
mystery into mystery, might have left us what 
music of bird-psalm and ocean-anthem! Who 
can fathom at what cost Jesus forbade himself 
to be a poet? Dramatist and painter, logician 
and philosopher, preacher and prophet, why 
did not Jesus write? Was it because when, just 
once, he moved his hand to shape written char- 
acters on the dust of the pavement, nobody 
looked at the words? 

Only once is Jesus described as writing. The 
incident is deathless. It occurs early on the 


174 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Wednesday morning preceding his execution. 
Starting before sunrise, he has come in from 
his night in the suburbs of Bethany to avail 
himself of that free lecture platform of the 
temple court. Every moment is precious for 
that teaching so soon to be silenced. Early 
as it is, the people have come pouring to him 
in throngs. Crowded about him, seated there 
on the pavement, they are not hostile, but 
breathlessly attentive. For a little while there 
is no low hiss of whispered hate at the fringe 
of his audience, for a little while there are no 
eyes full of mockery meeting his. The hour 
is sacredly his own. His eyes rest on the tower- 
ing candelabra set there in the temple court 
as symbols of the mystery of light. In the quiet 
of the freshening morning, he feels himself 
able to sway his hearers to his purpose; in 
another moment he may safely point from 
those high candles to himself, and there in the 
mounting sunshine may speak the words they 
shall never forget. The blazing announcement 
is almost on his tongue, “I am the light of the 
world.” Suddenly hoarse cries, stampeding 
feet, hooting, and there is shoved upon his pri- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 175 


vacy a disheveled form, a woman crimsoned 
with shame and insult, ringed by noisy ac- 
cusers who hate her as they hate himself. The 
flow of his speech is clipped as if by a knife, 
the light wiped from his face as if by a sponge. 
In utter revulsion at the indecency, at the out- 
rage aimed more at him than at the criminal, 
Jesus turns away to trace strange words upon 
the dust of the pavement. The brazen rabble 
stands over him, insistent for his judgment. 
Seated as he is, he lifts his head for one glance 
and one sentence, then again his finger traces 
words upon the dust. 

What words did Jesus write that morning? 
No one looked at them because everyone was 
looking at him, and presently they were wiped 
out by soiled, unheeding feet. Perhaps people 
failed to note the movement of his finger be- 
cause they were watching his handwriting as 
slowly it was shaping upon the faces of those 
present, upon face after face, each taking the 
impress of that one sentence, “That man 
among you who is sinless, let him cast the first 
stone” —judgment engraved on face after 
face, beginning with the eldest even unto the 


176 CHAOS AND A CREED 


youngest, and last of all inscribed upon the 
burning forehead of one who heard, “Neither 
do I condemn you,” and went forth, a woman 
new-made on that new morning. 

This incident holds the answer to the ques- 
tion, why did not Jesus write? He has written 
his autobiography, however, just as actually, 
just as consciously, as any of the men and 
women whose printed volumes stand upon our 
bookshelves. He has definitely chosen to per- 
sist not by means of language, but by means 
of creative influence, by means of successive 
resurrections of his personality under aspects 
ever more vital, by means of embodying him- 
self in a multitude of men. Jesus had the same 
motive for writing his memoirs that every great 
self-historian has had, namely, to make plain 
to future generations the principles of his 
work, philosophy, and conduct, and to draw 
with his own hand his own portrait for poster- 
ity. Men have given the world their own ac- 
count of themselves because they fought 
against dying the death of misunderstanding. 
Yet the greatest of the great have always been 
too wise to write their own lives, and among 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 177 


these, Jesus realized most clearly of them all, 
the reasons why a man’s autobiography may 
forever falsify him, for there is this peril always 
in depicting oneself, that every one distrusts 
the self-portrait. If we modern readers doubt 
the truthfulness of the four men who described 
Jesus, how much more would we doubt the 
truthfulness of Jesus if he had described him- 
self! Knowing the weakness of human nature, 
other men than Jesus have refrained from writ- 
ing their autobiographies, but knowing the 
strength of human nature, Jesus wrote his auto- 
biography with confidence. With the sureness 
of a sculptor chiseling marble, he determined 
to make himself alive to future ages, not 
through the power of words, but through his 
power to recreate personality and redirect its 
aspiration. Jesus was a timeless character com- 
pelled to impress himself upon time in terms 
that should last forever. Having, as he be- 
lieved, a priceless message to deliver, and only 
three years in which to deliver it, Jesus was 
forced to shrewd appraisements and to instant 
valuations. He therefore weighed the value 
of language to a nicety, respecting and em- 


178 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ploying words just in so far as they had capac- 
ity to transmit life, and discarding them just 
in so far as they had capacity to destroy it. 
Whether or not he was self-deceived, Jesus 
habitually spoke and acted in terms of the 
eternal rather than of the ephemeral. To himall 
language was but a passing vapor transiently 
shaped to the movement of man’s breath; there- 
fore for the perpetuation of a volume to be 
open to all men in all eras, he chose to write his 
history upon the only medium capable of re- 
ceiving the impress of eternity. 

It is possible to read the autobiography of 
Jesus as we would read the autobiography of 
any other man, studying in it, one by one, his 
principles as he himself elucidates them, his 
portrait as he himself draws it, and his medium 
of transmission as he himself treats it. Such a 
study will reveal that those principles are too 
vital to be learned in any other way than by 
living them; so long as they are merely dis- 
cussed they decompose into mere controversy, 
so long as the Sermon on the Mount is not 
practiced, it remains only the mocking tinkle 
from within the grave of a buried hope. Such 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 179 


a study will show, too, that if Jesus had at- 
tempted, as many lesser men have done, to 
draw his own portrait in the language of his 
own era, he might have condemned to the effect 
of a mere death-mask the most living face from 
out all history. And as one examines Jesus’s 
method of treating that contemporary human- 
ity on which he determined to engrave himself, 
one may discover that his chosen method ‘of 
transmission makes both his principles and his 
portrait as instant in challenge as they were 
the first time we crucified him. The very fact 
that the record of Christ’s teaching, both the 
written and the unwritten record, is broken and 
fallible and inadequate makes each individual’s 
faith dependent upon audacious application, 
cries to each one of us to swing out into the 
abyss of the unproven, and ascertain each his 
own powers, through the most daring adven- 
ture known to men, the adventure of creation. 


Jesus's Principles 


For one who would study Jesus’s own ac- 
count of his life’s adventure with the same rev- 
erence which one would accord to the self- 


180 CHAOS AND A CREED 


revelations of any friend, the subject-matter of 
his autobiography is seen to be essentially the 
same as that of any great teacher or doctor. 
His memoirs consist, that is, of his principles 
plus himself. The entrance of Jesus into his- 
tory marks a turning point in the course of 
human thinking. In three brief years of hur- 
ried oral instruction he set humanity a new 
objective, toward the attainment of which the 
course of the past twenty centuries is only an 
incoherent, only a half-convinced, beginning. 

Jesus was a physician, a master of mental 
and spiritual therapy. He has left us a record 
of typical cases supplemented by as clear an 
explanation of his technique in dealing with 
each, as was possible in view of the limited 
vocabulary available for his use in his own age, 
and the still limited spiritual perception avail- 
able for his use in ours. No doctor would, 
however, be satisfied with the mere relieving of 
individual cases, but would endeavor to dis- 
cover the underlying causes of disease and to 
formulate general rules for cure, for other- 
wise his skill would die with him and his pro- 
fession be in no way advanced by his belonging 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 181 


to it. There is no sin more ostracized than a 
doctor’s keeping his secrets to himself. As an 
investigator of the human soul, Jesus was too 
intrepidly curious, and as a teacher of new 
principles of conduct he was too lucid, to have 
been content merely with opening blind eyes; 
he was impelled to enunciate directions for 
destroying all blindness; he was not content 
merely to liberate paralyzed limbs, he was im- 
pelled to discover means toward a courage that 
should combat all the paralysis of fear; he was 
not content merely to call back the dead to 
activity, he was impelled to prove an hypothe- 
sis that would transform death itself from the 
most depressing to the most energizing force 
in the world. 

Since Jesus was not only a doctor, but a 
teacher, experimenting with novel theories of 
the soul’s education, his one hope of perpetu- 
ating his experiments was to teach other men 
to teach. In methods of healing and in methods 
of educating, Jesus was beyond conception au- 
dacious, so that, as his own biographer, it was 
imperative that he elucidate those methods 
most clearly, lest the cowardice of the men 


182 CHAOS AND A CREED 


coming after him should fail to carry his theory 
and his practice through to what he believed 
to be their logical conclusion in terms of racial 
progress. 

Jesus left his dusky carpenter shop, barred 
by the sun shaft from the open door, and in his 
lithe young manhood went swinging along the 
narrow walled streets of his little Nazareth, 
passed between the freshening orange groves, 
and climbed the nearest mountain to face alone 
the challenge of his time, challenge from its vast 
incoherence to his own clarity. He looked down 
at the twisting caravan routes, and knew from 
of old their blind and ceaseless movement, past 
desert and mountain and sea, thirstily on to 
Rome with arid gold from India, thirstily back 
to India with arid gold from Rome. He saw 
the dusty camel boy, the sweating Ethiopian, 
the contemptuous Roman, the trodden Jew, 
the crafty Greek, and he saw them all as men 
shackled. The clear-eyed stripling from little 
Nazareth needed no scholar’s learning to in- 
form him of the past; he read that past from 
its fetters as he saw them stunting the men and 
women of the present. Looking back into far- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 183 


thest history, Jesus saw the long caravan of 
humanity come stumbling ever on and on, 
heavy with its weight of treasure. Then he 
turned to gaze into man’s future. From the 
height of his fearless solitude he saw. Like 
Moses, alone upon the mountain, he heard a 
message delivered to his keeping. Kindled with 
a burning hope, he went down again from the 
windy freedom of the heights, passing the 
orange groves, glistening and fragrant, tread- 
ing again the tiny streets, entering again the 
low-walled dusky shop, reassuming his leather 
apron and his saw, thus awaiting the consum- 
mation of his message. 

Jesus himself is always the sole authentic 
revelation of his own convictions. As a physi- 
cian, he asked people to believe only those 
rules of health that had made him strong. As 
a teacher he presented only those theories of 
education that had made him wise. Since his 
words, although the most creative ever spoken, 
are yet the lesser element in his account of him- 
self, his message, because expressed in the lumi- 
nous terms of his own character, shines forth 
against all the incoherence of history. 


184 CHAOS AND A CREED 


It is possible to disagree about what Jesus 
said, but never, for honest and humble students 
of the man in the biography, is it possible to 
disagree about what Jesus was. Human ideal- 
ism climbs no higher than Jesus of Nazareth. 
In him conviction and conduct were so inex- 
tricably interwoven that to separate his prin- 
ciples and his personality as subjects for ex- 
amination is a task almost impossible. No 
critic would attempt to divide them except to 
emphasize their mutual illumination. In the 
difficult effort of analyzing my creed, when I 
try to define for myself, first the principles and 
then the personality of the man Jesus, I find 
myself deducing both from their effect when 
applied; still more do I deduce both from their 
effect when not applied. The handwriting of 
Jesus is starkest on those pages that have re- 
sisted its impress. 

No one is more sharply conscious than I my- 
self of the apparent effrontery and absurdity 
of trying to say anything new about Jesus. 
Once again I repeat that this whole book is 
written for the sifting of my own faith, and 
that I make my conclusions public solely with 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 185 


the aim of perhaps stimulating some few other 
men to make the same investigation. From 
babyhood, Christ and Christianity have been 
familiar words to all of us; it is only lately, 
in the tragic confusion of all thought and of 
all purpose which, within the last decade, has 
blotted out our old familiar world, that I have 
felt the impulse to discover exactly what Jesus 
and his teaching mean to me. In what I am 
about to write, I am trying simply to define 
those elements in the teaching of Jesus which, 
from the modest standpoint of my own opinion, 
have proved, for history at large, powerful 
enough to rename chronology, and for my own 
everyday living and thinking have proved vital 
enough to counteract fear. At best a man’s 
faith must be as hesitant as it is adventurous, a 
wind-blown candle flame against the engulfing 
black of chaos. ‘This then, to me, is the message 
of Jesus written upon history. 

Looking back at humanity as it had been, 
and forward at humanity as it might become, 
the carpenter of Nazareth conceived the free 
development of the individual as the primary 
necessity of all racial advance. How profound 


186 CHAOS AND A CREED 


this conviction was for him is shown by his 
own adventure in personal initiative, the great- 
est example in history of individual effort 
against odds. All that circumstances could do 
to frustrate a man’s purpose, they did to Jesus 
of Nazareth; all that a man can do to frustrate 
circumstances, Jesus of Nazareth proved. 
Both his preaching and his conduct are evi- 
dence in support of his belief that to raise 
each individual man to the nth degree of his 
innate resources, would mean a new liberation 
of movement as momentous as that of the day 
when the first ape staggered upright. Jesus 
believed the greatest deterrent to human indi- 
viduality to be cowardice—cowardice taking a 
hundred names and forms, but always in last 
analysis the supreme force toward inertia. 'To 
emancipate any man, it would be necessary to 
give him reassurance profound enough to coun- 
teract those primordial fears that are his racial 
inheritance and personal motive inspiring 
enough to destroy those intenser fears that are 
the result of his own bitter experience. Certain 
convictions and certain practices make for this 
desideratum of fearlessness, and these Jesus’s 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 187 


own example makes shining clear. It is because 
of the tendency of all creeds to crystallize into 
stereotyped phrase, that we have come to look 
at the theories of Jesus more in their relation 
to the doctrines of the church than to the doc- 
trines of science. But his theories are dynamic 
enough to reanimate the doctrines of both. 
Jesus believed in the exhaustless power of cer- 
tain truths to stimulate initiative, and these 
truths he relates always to personal courage, 
while our own connotation too often loses sight 
of this emphasis. Not to be cloistered in doc- 
trine, or ritual, but to be incorporated as a 
means of intrepid growth, did Jesus iterate the 
themes, eternal life, love of man, love of God. 
Jesus believed no man could attain personality 
so long as he was afraid of death, afraid of an 
enemy, afraid of chaos. Therefore, he taught 
reverence for life, reverence for enemies, rev- 
erence for God, as the three means to make us 
brave enough to be ourselves. 

It may be illuminating to examine these 
three fundamental principles of Jesus—respect 
for God, respect for man, respect for life— 
solely from the angle of the power of each to 


188 CHAOS AND A CREED 


liberate development, to combat fear. Jesus 
perceived that there could be no surer way 
to self-confidence than to feel that one was at 
every moment in the presence of a being su- 
premely powerful and yet supremely kind, a 
being as eager for our growth and our happi- 
ness as any human parent. But if a man were 
to associate with God as freely and fearlessly 
as a child, Jesus saw that such a God must 
be fit for man’s association. No man would 
become brave enough to be self-creative 
through a belief in a deity himself only half- 
created. “Be ye therefore perfect” would have 
been a cynical admonition if Jesus had not first 
predicated that the father in heaven 7s per- 
fect. The God who should reassure men for 
their own puny adventure in nobility, Jesus 
saw, must be no erring Zeus, but a God wise 
enough to satisfy Socrates; no avenging Jeho- 
vah, but a God tender enough to satisfy F'ran- 
cis of Assisi. That God who, step by step, ac- 
companied the lonely adventure essayed by 
Jesus of Nazareth is a God noble enough for 
any man’s companionship. 

Jesus, who never compromised with aus- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 189 


terity, saw that there was no truer means of 
attaining courage than by actually loving an 
unseen deity. He saw that there is no braver 
man than the one who has sent his own heart 
out into space calling, “Father.” The man 
who has won for himself the answer to that cry 
has become invincible to endure all the acci- 
dents of human affection. It is because he 
believes such immunity from the chances and 
changes of all merely mortal passions and rela- 
tionships imperative for any individual’s free 
growth, that Jesus makes love—actual, literal 
love—of an invisible God, the chief of his three 
fundamentals of emancipation. 

Vital words have become so stale with usage 
that they are often practically moribund, but I 
am trying to employ the words “love of God” 
as if they were not a phrase, but a fact. I mean 
the voluntary convinced attempt to make the 
presence of God as real in one’s daily life as 
the presence of one’s family. It is a practice 
as difficult to attain as is the fluency of a de- 
fective muscle or of some undeveloped mental 
power. Jesus, however, thought the ability to 
love an invisible God quite as necessary to our 


190 CHAOS AND A CREED 


courageous evolution from matter to spirit as 
the cultivation of our biceps or of our memo- 
ries. A habit of companionship with an unseen 
entity, one that we believe noble beyond the 
farthest reaches of our aspiration, inevitably 
gives aman the habit of making spiritual rather 
than materialist judgments in all things. Jesus 
beyond all other men believed in our steadfast 
evolution out of bestiality up to spirituality. 
Kiven we ourselves are compelled to surmise 
the upward tendency of all development when 
we look first at an amoeba, and then at Edith 
Cavell. Now Christ’s doctrine of the non- 
resistance of evil has always been resisted by 
Christians, and yet, always supremely consist- 
ent with his theories, Jesus believed it enough 
to die for it. Jesus conceived the law of the 
soul’s growth to be as inexorable as the law of 
a tree’s growth, and he conceived this law of 
the soul’s growth to be always by spiritual, not 
by physical, methods. It needed no divine wis- 
dom, but mere human wit, to observe that 
throughout history, never the things of the 
body, but only the things of the spirit, have 
endured. In Jesus’s day the kingdom of David 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 191 


was a dead memory, but the psalms of David 
were alive on men’s lips. 

Now Jesus not only believed that the prog- 
ress of all evolution is from the bestial and 
physical toward the spiritual, but he also be- 
heved in our ability to intensify and accelerate 
this progress. Therefore he felt that when- 
ever, foolishly atavistic and craven, we em- 
ployed physical means for security or advance, 
we were doomed to frustrated effort because we 
were opposing the course of nature, as he him- 
self saw the course of nature. It is perfectly 
possible to argue that Jesus was entirely mis- 
taken in such reading of the universe, but that 
he did so read it, seems to me a sound conclu- 
sion in the light of the methods he himself em- 
ployed and the death he himself died. Con- 
vinced that no empire could endure except one 
resting on a purely immaterial foundation, 
Jesus felt that the very existence of his King- 
dom of Heaven depended on men’s becoming 
courageous enough to employ, never physical, 
but always spiritual, methods for building the 
structure of their economics and of their gov- 
ernment. No man, he felt, would be so well 


192 CHAOS AND A CREED 


equipped to distinguish between the perma- 
nent and the impermanent elements of recon- 
struction as the man whom association with 
God had habituated to spiritual standards. 

I offer no argument for or against the prac- 
ticality of Jesus’s philosophy. I am trying 
merely to emphasize his own emphasis on the 
creative force of courage. Love your enemies, 
is a principle that only a fearless man could 
have expressed either in words or in conduct. 
All hatred is, obviously, merely cowardice. We 
hate only those people who have hurt us or can 
hurt us. Hatred, of course, is of all forms of 
fear the most natural and deep-seated, harking 
back to the time when the beast within us 
moved in water or jungle in dread of its life. 
There was a time when survival depended on 
hatred, when safety depended on the fear of 
an enemy. But it is conceivable, if evolution 
is indeed the development of the man out of 
the animal, that a time might arrive when the 
law of safety for the animal might become the 
law of destruction for the man. It is conceiv- 
able that to revert to the psychology of the 
beast, in an era when conditions had perhaps 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 193 


at last become favorable to the psychology of 
the man, might be to arrest evolution indefi- 
nitely. Such would seem to have been the con- 
viction of Jesus when he himself fearlessly ad- 
ventured new and untested faculties. Jesus 
dared to love his fellow-man, foe and friend 
alike. Jesus saw clearly that no man is cou- 
rageous so long as he wishes to injure anyone. 
He affirmed the principle, Love each other, 
because to him, as doctor and teacher, it was 
an incontrovertible scientific truth that love is 
the bravest form of self-risk, and hatred the 
meanest form of self-saving. 

For myself, I always see all Jesus’s teaching 
from the aspect of his one all-inclusive pur- 
pose; I believe that the supreme reason for his 
appearance upon earth was to give us courage 
to create ourselves. With this supreme aim I 
connect the many themes of his teaching, such 
as his insistence on the power of spirit over 
matter, his belief that faith in God is the most 
splendid adventure open to humanity, and his 
iteration of the holiness of all life. Of Jesus’s 
three cardinal theses, veneration for God, ven- 
eration for one’s fellows, veneration for life, it 


194 CHAOS AND A CREED 


is the implication of the last that has been most 
neglected. It is easier for our rudimentary 
spiritual faculties to dwell on the aspects of 
death than on the aspects of life, easier to 
accept and incorporate into our philosophy and 
behavior all the connotation of the word de- 
struction than all the connotation of the word 
indestructibility. But Jesus accepted all the 
stern implications of that worn term, eternal 
life. Jesus held himself to be indestructible, 
and since he also held the aim of all God’s slow 
creative processes to be the perfection of per- 
sonality, it was but logical that he should re- 
gard our brief physical existence as only one 
phase of an endless development toward that 
perfection. But it cannot be too strongly em- 
phasized that Jesus also believed—what Chris- 
tians have conspicuously evaded believing— ~ 
that this physical phase is, for some mysterious 
reason, worthy of our uttermost reverence, our 
uttermost investigation of its possibilities. 

It is impossible, however, to appreciate 
Jesus’s sanctification of life until one has made 
forever clear Jesus’s attitude toward death. 
Now Jesus as a man was both supremely piti- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 195 


ful and supremely practical. Always before 
him as his own greatest problem was the find- 
ing of a solution for other people’s problems. 
Jesus saw that for life as we live it the most 
terrifying of all catastrophes is death as we 
see it. To his thinking, therefore, the fear of 
death was of all fears the most imperative for 
a deliverer to annul. This would seem to be 
the argument deduced from Jesus’s actions: 
if men, to whom death must seem the most 
absolute of all the facts of existence, could 
once be made bold enough to deny this seem- 
ing, made brave enough to assert against the 
appearance of dissolution, the reality of sur- 
vival, then by virtue of the daring engendered 
by their denial they would transform death 
from supreme deterrent to supreme incentive. 
There was nothing, Jesus conceived, that could 
make faith so absolute as to deny that death 
is absolute. 

The story of Jesus is the story of a man who 
set himself to disprove death. Whether you 
regard that story as fact or fiction, you have to 
admit that the unswerving motive of its drama 
is the denial of death. The protagonist of that 


196 CHAOS AND A CREED 


drama first restored to life on each of three 
occasions a child, a youth, a man, then, daunt- 
less, himself adventured his own hypothesis. 
Did he or did he not establish the truth of his 
great conjecture? For an affirmative answer 
there is this much to be said: there would never 
have been any Christian era had it not been for 
those who have believed that Jesus proved men 
are greater than death; not one of us would 
ever have heard the word Christ, had it not 
been for those who believed that with their 
own eyes they saw Jesus return, unscathed in 
character, from the grave. 

Understanding Jesus’s scorn of death, one 
begins to understand his reverence for life. 
There could have been no purpose in freeing 
earthly existence from the horror of death if 
earthly existence had not been abundantly 
worth freeing. There is no explanation of the 
agony of Gethsemane except that Jesus had 
a passionate yearning to live. Jesus of Galilee 
did not wish to die; men killed him. All the 
splendid capacities of his manhood begged to 
test the splendid capacities of earth. Jesus 
never degraded earth to a vale of tears. In- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 197 


stead, he bequeathed, as the most precious thing 
he could leave his friends, his joy in life. While 
we are still as careless of human life as are 
the animals, while we defile and trample its 
possibilities as pigs do pearls, Jesus had at- 
tained to a higher plane of vision. To him all 
physical aspects and activities were sacred, as 
being the holy vessel of the life principle every- 
where abounding. Jesus saw this earth and 
each man’s pregnant sojourn upon it as bound- 
less privilege, for he conceived no nobler invi- 
tation to man’s powers than that of imposing a 
spiritual order upon an inchoate universe. 
Nowhere have human compromise and eva- 
sion so falsified Jesus’s teaching as in denying 
the significance he attached to the words, eter- 
nal life. That we continue to be ourselves after 
death, Jesus taught as an energizing truth, but 
he drew no raptured post-mundane pictures, 
because he knew they would be enervating. 
With divine common sense he saw that to lose 
ourselves in contemplation of a world to be is 
irreverence toward this gift of a world that is. 
We shall never comprehend the meaning of 
the words, eternal life, until we copy Jesus’s 


198 CHAOS AND A CREED 


manner of living them. For any man to live as 
if he thought Jesus meant not earth, but heaven 
by the words, “I am come to give you life, and 
to give it more abundantly,” is to mock at 
human dignity. 

That each man, and that all humanity, might 
push unfettered toward their unguessed con- 
summation, Jesus preached to men belief in 
themselves. It is as if he said, ““Once believe 
that the blind, pushing energy within your 
being, that the blind, pushing aspiration within 
the race, is indestructible and divinely im- 
planted, and race and individual will be set 
free for dauntless growth.” How many times 
did Jesus iterate, “I have come to the world 
to reveal to you your own indestructibility; I 
give you eternal life.’”’ Always sluggish with 
inertia, always complacently permitting theol- 
ogy to swathe Jesus in dogma, we have denied 
ourselves Jesus’s gift of eternal life by pushing 
the conception on into a post-mundane future. 
But Jesus means not heaven and the hereafter, 
but earth and now, when he cries to all man- 
kind, “Fling loose of your deadening fears; I 
charge you to become alive, as I am alive.” 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 199 


Jesus's Portrait of Himself 


The portrait of Jesus is a different portrait 
for every brain that looks at it. For myself, if 
I had to select the passage best revealing the 
different aspects in which I visualize the Naza- 
rene, I should choose the sixth chapter of John. 
Whether the delineation in that chapter be 
that of a man or of God, it is that of a person 
as real as the looming shape of a mountain 
beating on one’s vision against a dusty win- 
dowpane. 

This portrait chapter falls into four scenes. 
The first glows with the mellow restfulness of 
sunset. Jesus is seated high on a grassy table- 
land, with his little group of friends about him. 
Small time there was to draw deep breath in 
Jesus’s crowded days. The sick, the sick, the 
sick, dirty and poor, festering, crippled, and 
malodorous, out of every village people came, 
dragging, leading, carrying him their sick. 
And because they saw his healing, people fol- 
lowed him to observe other wonders. He had 
become a country-wide sensation, feverishly 
sought, possessively demanded. For a little 


200 CHAOS AND A CREED 


while that afternoon, Jesus, a young man, 
clean-limbed, vigorous, athletic, breathed the 
wholesome air of the mountain, gazed on the 
gleaming lake of Gennesaret, there at ease, 
circled in blessed privacy. Then he looked 
down, saw the crowd pouring over the plain, 
relentlessly approaching. His word is instant, 
homely, practical, “How are we going to feed 
them?” He asks the question of Philip, that 
Philip who, even after three years of intimacy, 
was still to be grossly unaware that he had 
walked with wonder, that Philip who now fails 
to guess that Jesus might do for others what 
he habitually avoided doing for himself or his 
friends. For himself and for them he refused 
to turn stones into bread, for the founders of 
his creed required the stoutest form of faith, 
that which rests on miracle of spirit, not of 
matter. Always Jesus’s disciples listened to 
him attentive but bewildered, always they 
obeyed him, compelled by some strange author- 
ity in his lightest tone, but often they obeyed 
blind and puzzled. ‘There must have been some- 
thing noteworthy in Jesus’s manner of blessing 
food, his hands must have practiced some sig- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 201 


nificant gesture, his voice taken on some mys- 
terious depth, or his friends would not so con- 
stantly have mentioned his manner of thanking 
God for bread, a ritual unnoted by the hungry 
crowd. The long munching lines are not too 
engrossed, however, to observe a miracle and 
to calculate the possibilities of this abundance. 
A whispered purpose runs like a flame along 
the lines. The mob, at last sated, surges to its 
feet, flings aside and tramples the mysterious 
bread, swarms toward Jesus, intent on forcing 
him to be their king. What better use for a 
prophet than to feed them? Five thousand men 
with one greedy purpose, and against that pur- 
pose one man standing, motionless, ironic, that 
man whom later on men crucified because he 
insisted on being God not after their pattern, 
but his own. Again and again Jesus demon- 
strated his ability to control a mob, to drive 
them back, as now, like hungry dogs snarling 
for another onslaught. The words are not re- 
corded with which that afternoon he left the 
rabble cowed and turned from them to climb, 
once again, still higher, to solitude. 

The second scene is dim with the lonely 


202 CHAOS AND A CREED 


shadows of evening, deepening to a midnight 
terror of mounting waves, and of a looming 
form that trod upon them. The association of 
his disciples with Jesus seems always to show 
that they felt themselves to be moving hourly, 
step by step, with a mystery, and yet were 
invincibly aware of a surpassing tenderness 
that enwrapped them. Jesus, from time to 
time, uttered enigmatic words that they dis- 
cussed in whispers; he exhibited strange im- 
pulses that they dared not question; he gave 
strange commands that they dared not disobey. 
He sometimes went and came mysteriously, 
but never left them long alone. On this eve- 
ning, they wait for hours in hope; then, since 
they are fishermen to whom the water seems 
friendlier than a lonely beach, they go down 
to the lakeside and embark for Capernaum. 
The treacherous lake wind swoops down and 
their frantic oars lash at the waves. ‘Then a 
form shapes dim upon the water, a man walk- 
ing as if on a floor, steadily bearing down upon 
their tossing boat, and they are wild with fear. 
Yet it is not the supernatural that is the signifi- 
cant element of the narrative, it is the instancy 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 203 
with which Jesus, received into the boat, be- 
comes again the human comrade; it is the reas- 
surance of words inevitably true to character, 
“Mystery that I am, you know me too well to 
be afraid.” 

Writing himself throughout all the book of 
John upon the most veracious page that he 
found in his three brief years of public activity, 
the page of a fisher-boy’s mind, Jesus devotes 
the bulk of this sixth chapter not to the passing 
incident of his walking upon the water, that 
flickering light on a divinity tranquilly master 
of waves and storm, nor yet to the supernatural 
aspects of a feast divinely generous and churl- 
ishly eaten; Jesus, writing his own account of 
the feeding of the five thousand, passes by the 
mere miracle, to enlarge, in words still quick 
with the daring that astounded the congrega- 
tion in the synagogue of Capernaum, upon the 
significance of his gift of loaves and fish. 

There is the glare of hot daylight upon that 
synagogue scene in Capernaum. Jesus is not 
speaking now to the mob determined to make 
him a dictator who should obey their will. 


204 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Many of the five thousand must have lingered 
on in Capernaum, but the subtle, critical dis- 
putants whom Jesus now opposes have the 
character of mocking Pharisees rather than of 
brute herd leaders. Jesus’s words burn with 
impetuosity; again and again occurs that char- 
acteristic phrase of his, which beats through 
the gospel of John as it must in actuality have 
beaten like a refrain through Jesus’s Aramaic, 
verily, verily—aunv dunv. Jesus is always a 
spendthrift of his powers. He flings a price- 
less miracle of teaching upon a company as 
needy and as callous as that other crowd that 
had munched like animals the loaves sanctified 
by his hands. Just as those others had tram- 
pled his bread, so now derisive enemies pollute 
his words with their sneering. A passionate 
spendthrift, that young Galilean Jesus, meet- 
ing contempt in every eye in that muttering, 
taunting synagogue, and still offering his gift, 
the bread of life held out to them, as he be- 
lieves, new from the very hands of God. Could 
any but a man divine have dared to utter words 
so transcendent to men so contemptuous? Per- 
ceiving back of all the arrogance the mortal 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 205 


hunger and disease, he cries, ““Here is my body, 
eat it! Here is my blood, drink it!” 

In all literature there is no passage so stark 
with contrast between generosity and mockery. 
There in that little synagogue of Capernaum, 
once again alone, facing a mob, but a mob of 
sophists now, a young man stands, with wide- 
flung arms of quenchless yearning, “You ask 
of me the bread of death, but I cry to you that 
the man who dares to believe in me, that the 
man who dares to become one with my pur- 
pose, as food becomes one with the body, the 
man who dares to fuse his being with mine, as 
drink becomes fused with the blood, that man 
shall have within him life even as I, standing be- 
fore you on this new day, have within me life.” 
And against that burning appeal, “Behold, I 
offer you myself,” only the wagging of crafty 
turbans, only the laughter of all the mockers: 
“What is the madman babbling? That we 
should eat his flesh? Is he staging some ma- 
gician’s trick of pouring his blood into a cup 
and offering it about for drink? Why is this 
upstart ranting that he comes with a gift from 


206 CHAOS AND A CREED 


God, when we all know him the carpenter’s 
son yonder there in Nazareth?” 

A last scene as vivid and as searching as if 
the walls of the room where each of us is at 
this moment sitting should drop, and show us 
again, as at the first, Jesus with his circling 
company of twelve. But now the group is 
shadowy in the darkness of the evening that 
presses upon the faint embers of their little 
fire. But now there is no endless crowd com- 
ing with its menacing gift of popularity. In- 
stead the long roads are heavy with the feet of 
those who have turned back from a teaching too 
stern and from a man too disconcerting. The 
man who alone of men dared to say, “I am 
life,” now sits brooding upon this spurning of 
his gift. Whether one rejects Jesus or accepts 
him, there is surely one thought no one can 
escape—Jesus of Galilee must have been the 
loneliest man that ever lived. We who read 
his biography are crass if we suppose he ex- 
perienced only one Calvary. “My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We think 
it the loneliest word ever cried by humanity 
into the black mystery of space. It is no lone- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 207 


lier than that earlier cry to his own twelve, 
“Will ye also go away?” Did any man ever 
try to inscribe himself on more unlikely mate- 
rial than Jesus chose? The fact that the sixth 
chapter of John exists is proof that he was 
justified in his choice, yet the closing words 
are also proof that no man ever fought so hard 
for his faith in men. Of all the human words 
that a most human Jesus ever uttered, there 
are none that ring more veracious than those, 
“Did I not myself select you as my twelve 
friends, and yet even among you one of you 
is a mocker?” 


Jesus's Method 


For twenty centuries Jesus has been strug- 
gling to make his principles and his portrait 
plain to men, but we ourselves have condemned: 
them to obscurity, not so much because we do 
not accept them as because we refuse Jesus’s 
own method of revealing them. Every great 
teacher or doctor who has ever tried to trans- 
mit to the future his own. theories and his own 
personality has also tried to explain his own 
method of applying his theories. Jesus lays 


208 CHAOS AND A CREED 


down certain laws as indispensable to all his 
experiments in healing and in educating, but 
we shall never read his message accurately until 
we imitate his own courage in basing it on no 
authority whatsoever except the authority of 
its application. Jesus’s method is as common- 
place—that is, as true to everyday experience 
—as it is creative. Perceiving the innermost 
mechanism of the human intellect, Jesus, the 
psychologist, enunciated the innermost mech- 
anism of his practice. He spoke with author- 
ity and not as the scribes when he declared 
that conviction is not conviction unless it has 
become action, and that action is not action, 
but mere motion, unless it springs from con- 
viction. This is not theological dogma, but 
plain scientific law utilized by every alienist in 
every hour of his work. Whatever any man’s 
philosophy, whether pagan, materialist, or 
Christian, so long as he keeps that philosophy 
separate from his deeds, the man remains unco- 
ordinated, incapable of development. 
According to the argument of Jesus, you 
cannot have this necessary interplay of convic- 
tion and action without constant recourse to 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 209 


hypothesis—that is, without constantly making 
trial of that which you believe, but have not 
proved. But acting on an hypothesis is only 
another word for faith, that underlying method 
of all evolution which Jesus merely carries logi- 
cally on to its spiritual application. Faith, 
whether scientific or spiritual, is the ascent, step 
by step, from one hypothesis to another, as if 
one built a firm staircase out into chaos, but 
to Jesus, the supremely courageous, the ad- 
venture of the spirit out into space, climbing by 
hypothesis after hypothesis, up to God, is the 
supremely emancipating exercise for the de- 
velopment of each man’s personality. 

The logic of Jesus’s method lies in his em- 
bodiment of it. It is that embodiment which 
alone renders plausible the astounding rule 
that he laid down as the supreme rule of his 
technique. If one honestly tries to divest one’s 
mind of all obscuring associations, all phrases 
that have become pitifully stereotyped, and 
to look at Jesus as a live person standing there 
in the window’s light, it seems indeed an amaz- 
ing dictum for any man to have pronounced, 
for Jesus declared that the only way to know 


210 CHAOS AND A CREED 


his principles or his personality was by an inex- 
orable intimacy with himself. 'To practice asso- 
ciation with some one twenty centuries dead is 
an incredible demand, yet it is a demand that 
we Christians have sung about and prayed 
about ever since we were big enough to sing 
or to speak, but perhaps if we had ever obeyed 
it, the Christian era might long since have be- 
come Christian. 

Long ago in the little synagogue of Caper- 
naum, Jesus, in language ablaze with Oriental 
imagery, invited the contemptuous scholars, 
the dogmatic clerics, the ambitious dema- 
gogues, the thick-witted fishermen, to an inti- 
macy with himself as absolute as it is liberaliz- 
ing, as blind as it is illuminating, as humbling 
as it is educative. But at the mere thought 
of accepting Jesus’s terms of our emancipation 
to be ourselves, how our lips curl and how clear 
still sounds the age-old laughter of that little 
synagogue beside the glittering lake! To walk 
hourly with the most enigmatic character in 
human history—this is a hard saying, who 
can accept it? There is no man of us who can- 
not hear his own voice joining the mockery of 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 211 


priest and scholar, of demagogue and laborer. 
Only a madman could have dreamed of writ- 
ing his creed of life upon so motley a throng. 
Yet still there cries to the lonely soul of each 
one of us from the far off, night-dimmed lake 
shore of Galilee that loneliness of a man who 
asks only to give himself, “Will ye also go 
away?” Yet, still, as we plod the long, black 
roads that lead far from Gennesaret, there 
flashes across our brains at times the strange 
conjecture: What might happen to the world’s 
progress if one man in every ten thousand 
should dare to obey Jesus’s command to asso- 
ciation? And across the blindness of our way 
there sometimes flames another question: Why, 
among all the teachers who, throughout the 
world’s slow history, have said, “Come unto 
God,” did Jesus alone say, “Come unto me?” 


The Medium on Which Jesus Wrote 


As I scrutinize the influence of Jesus upon 
history, that handwriting blotted and erased 
and spat upon, it sometimes seems to me that 
it is not so much the theories that he taught, 
and even not so much the life that he lived, as 


212 CHAOS AND A CREED 


it is his treatment of his chosen medium of 
transmission that best reveals in his autobiog- — 
raphy Jesus the man. It is Jesus’s faith in 
humanity that most convinces my own faith 
of his divinity. Only a creator could have ex- 
hibited such confidence in his creation as to 
intrust all revelation of himself to the mere 
chance that here and there throughout the blind 
and scattered years some few men might rec- 
ognize and follow him. The words of Jesus 
have come down to us only because every man 
has been left free to remember or forget them; 
the personality of Jesus has come down to us 
only because every man has been left free to 
reflect his character or to spurn it. More vital 
for a vital faith than any written Bible could 
ever be is the witness of Jesus’s relation to his- 
tory. Step by step as I build my creed, I ob- 
serve Jesus’s attitude, first, toward humanity 
at large, then toward the humanity of his own 
era, and last toward his personal associates in 
all eras. This handwriting of Jesus in terms 
of his effect must be studied by every creed- 
builder with equal regard to its acceptance and 
to its rejection. Pilate reveals Jesus as clearly 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 213 


as does Peter. The Pharisee reveals him as 
clearly as does the publican. The World War 
is the most practical argument history has ever 
declared for the establishment of Jesus’s im- 
practical Kingdom of Heaven. If by some 
strange chance Jesus should be God, then per- 
haps it is with a creator’s reverence for his own 
creation that he leaves every man who meets 
him free to become either a Judas or a John. 

The actual manner in which Jesus chose to 
inject himself into human history is for my 
own mind an evidence of a superhuman respect 
for human nature. His first requirement of 
himself as teacher and doctor was a lifetime 
of study. It needed no divine insight, but only 
common wisdom to perceive that enmity would 
never permit such thought as was shaping 
within him to have more than the briefest pub- 
lic hearing, and yet Jesus held himself rigidly 
to thirty years of silent observation before he 
presumed to instruct or to heal any man. Jesus 
compelled himself to be a carpenter before he 
dared to be a Christ. No achievement which 
humanity had reached before he came to clarify 
all further aspiration did this Christ despise. 


214 CHAOS AND A CREED 


The Galilean learned to curb within himself all 
his native impetuosity before he learned to curb 
a mob. Slowly, patiently, he shared the slow 
patience of the earlier Jewish prophets, who 
only gradually came to the realization of their 
mission, before he went forth, the greatest 
prophet of them all. In the solitude of the hills, 
alone with God, far more alone in the solitude 
of an uncomprehending village and an uncom- 
prehending family, Jesus had acquired the 
courage to be himself before he asked any man 
to be fearless in carving his own personality. 
Jesus humbled himself enough to walk rever- 
ently with every man before he asked any man 
to walk reverently with God. Jesus’s life thus 
shows him as equipped for his task of revela- 
tion to us of ourselves, not only by a creator’s 
knowledge of our capacities, but also by an 
everyday man’s everyday association with other 
men throughout thirty patient and utterly hu- 
man years. During those thirty years, the best 
that his neighbors learned of him was negative, 
that this man committed no sin; but the best 
that Jesus learned of his neighbors was posi- 
tive, that all men were capable of unlimited 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 215 


good. Jesus always respected others more than 
they respected him. The essence of his teaching 
is that he believes in a man’s power to create 
himself, while the man still doubts Jesus’s 
power to recreate him. The two potentialities 
are as Closely related as a sheet of paper is to 
the hand that writes upon it—without the 
paper the hand would be impotent; without the 
hand the paper would be blank. Every power 
that men possessed before he came to eluci- 
date all their powers, Jesus respected and uti- 
lized. As his kingdom is only the fulfillment 
of the best inherent in the old kingdom of 
David, so Jesus himself condescends to be 
merely the embodiment of the best inherent in 
men. It is this aspect which he chooses as the 
first step toward an intimacy, the terms of 
which can only be deciphered as day by day 
and word by word we learn a new alphabet of 
friendship. 

Jesus’s attitude toward our evolution differs 
from ours because he has boundless confidence 
in our power to accelerate it. His cures were 
instant because he convinced men that they had 
within them reserves of strength instantly re- 


216 CHAOS AND A CREED 


sponsive to his touch. “The poor have the 
gospel preached to them’’—in other words, he 
preached to the people belief in themselves. 
Believing ourselves sluggish, we remain bestial. 
Believing ourselves cruel, we remain weak. It 
is sentimental to trust one’s fellows. It is 
manly to doubt them. Yet there was one man 
brave enough to die for his faith in men, and 
brave enough to trust them to bring him back 
from death. Courageous enough to die for a 
world that laughed at his kindness, courageous 
enough to return to a world that still laughs 
at it, Jesus has succeeded in writing here and 
there, on this soul or on that, some lines of his 
own personality. 

It is impossible to observe Jesus’s respect 
for the material on which he wrote without the 
stirring within that material itself of a new 
self-respect. What are we that he should have 
trusted himself to us with such divine abandon? 
Whether or not he was mistaken, Jesus saw 
humanity as blind and groping, but alive with 
promise. Jesus, physician and teacher, gazed 
into his own Peter and John, gazed into Roman 
and Pharisee, Greek and Phoenician, into all 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 217 


those flesh-and-blood men immediate to his 
touch, then looked further down into Briton 
and Russian and French, into Italian and 
American, all the oncoming caravan of nations 
spreading like a page for his writing, and 
weighed the capacities of each for receiving 
his imprint, for it needed something liver than 
dust to retain the tracery of his finger, dead 
dust upon a pavement—forever trodden by 
worshipers too self-absorbed to stoop to read 
the handwriting of Jesus the wanderer, paus- 
ing for a few hours’ teaching in a temple’s outer 
court. Only spirit was substance plastic enough 
to retain the imprint of Jesus. It is true that 
other men than he have, like him, inscribed their 
lives upon other men, but no one of them ever 
treated this living sheet with the reverence and 
the sympathy with which Jesus treated it. 
More than a sculptor loves the marble that 
imprisons his statue of a god, Jesus of Naza- 
reth loved his Philip and his Nathaniel. Be- 
cause, above all other men before or since, he 
desired for himself self-expression, he under- 
stood the deathless yearning of every soul for 
freedom to be itself. Jesus had experienced 


218 CHAOS AND A CREED 


the agony of great impulses denied their outlet. 
The substance on which he chose to write was 
the most receptive he could have found, for his 
twelve were of the same flesh and blood as 
himself. 

Looking forth at all the universe groping 
blind and dark toward light, from it Jesus 
chose humanity as the only page ready for his 
inscribing; looking at all the strange, dark 
seethe of history, from it Jesus chose for his 
own contemporary setting that place and that 
date which, to any other observer, would have 
appeared, of all places and dates, the least 
promising; and out of that era of lost causes 
and dead hopes he chose, as recipients of his 
message to all time, only twelve men, eleven 
unlettered rustics from his own vigorous Gali- 
lee, and one other, from hypocrite Judea. 

Jesus never compromised with the contem- 
porary, and never despised it. His trust in 
humanity is nowhere more conspicuous than in 
his manner of compelling to his own purpose 
the petty, contemptuous, bigoted humanity of 
his own period. Across the Palestine of his 
day, his influence runs blazing clear, illumi- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 219 


nating the faces and the motives of the people 
who resented his presence. ‘Three men crucified 
Jesus—the priest, the politician, and the man 
in the street. Each of these three sought to 
impose his own authority upon Jesus, and, fail- 
ing to accomplish this, out of fear for that 
authority, killed him. There can be no God 
but our God, said the priest; there can be no 
king but Cesar, said Pilate; there can be no 
nation but our nation, said the man in the 
street. They were men of the past, those three, 
but Jesus was the man of the future. It was 
nothing to them in their panic that Jesus 
treated them and their past with a sublime con- 
sideration, for nothing in the past that was 
alive did Jesus ever destroy, and no man that 
dared to be himself did Jesus ever scorn. In 
his treatment of the contemporary, he sought 
to inform it with its full capacities, both of 
inheritance and of promise, condescending to 
use current speech, but chiming his utterance 
with eternity. If one compresses his recorded 
conversations and discussions and sermons, it 
is as if he said to the churchman, keep your 
ancient God; to Pilate, keep your ancient king; 


220 CHAOS AND A CREED 


to the mob, keep your ancient nation; but that 
you and they do not die, let me inform them 
with new vigor, for I come not to destroy but 
to fulfill. Jesus obeyed law and custom, wor- 
shiped in synagogue and temple, sanctioned 
tribute paid to Rome, satisfied the desire of 
the mob when they were hungry. He was never 
negative, never destructive. He did not deny 
any wisdom that tradition had written upon his 
contemporary setting; he merely tried to write 
that wisdom in terms of new inspiration. Over 
and over again the gospel narratives reiterate 
his emphasis, recording him as saying, “Phari- 
see, it is true that you have God to your father, 
but prove it by your sonship; vicegerent of 
empire, it is true that men must be governed, 
but governed not by force, but by conviction; 
patriot, it is true that your nation is unique 
among nations, but the greatness of any nation 
that endures is the greatness of a servant.” 
Twenty centuries ago, these ideas of Jesus 
were novel and dangerous. Twenty centuries 
ago, his propaganda was a menace to religion 
and government and nation, for he said to the 
moribund, “Let me give you enduring life.” 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 221 


By what they refused to accept, the character 
of his contemporaries and the character of 
Jesus are blazoned clear upon the manuscript 
of humanity. They were afraid, those three 
men of old Jerusalem, and so, for their own 
preservation from death, they crucified their 
Nazarene. To-day, where is that Jerusalem’s 
church, where is that Jerusalem’s government, 
where is that Jerusalem’s nation? 

In that little group of twelve whom Jesus 
chose to be his immediate pupils, there was no 
Pharisee, no Roman, no demagogue, but con- 
stantly, as would be true of any group of 
twelve men chosen in any time or place, the 
minds of Jesus’s associates are seen to be influ- 
enced by the philosophy of the Pharisee and 
the Roman and the demagogue. Both within 
and without, the apostles were beset with diffi- 
culties from which Jesus was always patiently 
trying to free them. Whether we consider 
Jesus as God or as man, all of us would surely 
admit that he was a teacher who thought his 
theories worth his scaffold. The actual meth- 
ods and the actual men this teacher selected as 
best fitted for the promulgation of new doctrine 


222 CHAOS AND A CREED 


are worth anyone’s studying merely for their 
effectiveness. One does not have to be religious 
in order to open the New Testament and dis- 
cover how Jesus treated his pupils, and what 
type of pupils he chose. 

Twelve men, of whom one was false, but not 
for this reason any less a witness to truth, 
changed the history of the world. These men 
were without money, without education, with- 
out experience, without prestige. Looked at 
as the gospels reveal them, they appear to be 
the most unlikely material ever chosen to be 
the missionaries of any cause. Their names 
have been raised to a dignity that has made 
their memories into shrines, but the truth is 
that if any of us had been living in the Pales- 
tine of Jesus, we should have considered Peter 
and James and John, Andrew and Thomas, 
too poor, too ignorant, too provincial, too un- 
couth, for notice. Least of all should we have 
dreamed that any man would be mad enough 
to intrust to their hands a purpose precious 
enough to die for. Looking back at the dis- 
ciples of Jesus, we make one great mistake: we 
attribute to each an innate, rather than an 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 223 


acquired, nobility, whereas not one of them 
exhibits any force of character until after asso- 
ciation with Jesus. And, a fact to be pro- 
foundly noted in its relation to the men of 
to-day and to the Jesus of to-day, this change 
of character does not occur until after the phys- 
ical presence of their master has been removed ; 
not until faith in the unseen has become their 
daily practice do the apostles reveal the cour- 
age of men recreated. Whatever we modern 
men may think of him, it is impossible, if we 
read the gospels with any scholarly candor, 
to see the disciples as inviting anyone’s atten- 
tion until Jesus has made men of them. If 
Jesus had not seen something in them, we 
should never have heard of them. And no less 
is it true that if they had not seen something 
in Jesus, we should never have heard of him. 

Jesus had no time to be anything but un- 
erring in his choice of material, for always 
people were as determined to give him death 
as he was to give them life, death by sneers 
until it should at last become death upon a 
cross. Forced to treat his own contemporary 
in such a way that it should hold his impress 


224 CHAOS AND A CREED 


forever, the Nazarene carpenter rejected all 
those death elements that rejected him and 
ventured his whole preservation upon those 
elements he believed to be permanent. Twelve 
men only, and all of them Jews, and all of them 
commanded to preach only to Jews. Jesus 
worked with units, not with aggregates. The 
smaller his audience, the more he was himself. 
He never spoke more eloquently than when 
alone with Nicodemus, alone with the Samari- 
tan woman at the well curb. His method with 
a pupil was to inscribe himself from within out. 
He wrote on some one individual heart some 
one individual word, and left it there like a 
flaming seed, and always the person he chose 
was an impossible person, and the word he 
chose an impossible word. On Peter, the un- 
stable, he wrote Rock; on John, so cruel that 
he would have summoned fire to consume an 
enemy, he wrote Love. Jesus’s faith in his 
power to create personality was obviously an 
impossible faith, and yet the chapter of his 
influence that Peter embodied is still entitled 
Rock, and John’s entitled Love. Jesus reck- 
oned power in terms of personality; we reckon 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 225 


it in numbers. We commute our advance in 
strings of ciphers. The churches count their 
converts by the hundreds, the armies count 
their slain enemies by the thousands. The first 
thing that strikes the mind in Jesus’s choice 
of his promulgators is that he chose so few. 
Yet perhaps the reason modern progress is so 
hazy and abortive is that we move always under 
the hallucination of numbers, and have become 
so accustomed to handling dollars that we 
fancy souls are also subject to computation. 
Possibly the marvelous rapidity of Jesus’s 
progress across the page of pagan thought is 
due to his using a shrewder psychology than 
do we. Jesus, compressed as he was into a 
petty contemporary setting, and knowing that 
his failure to transmit himself meant the fail- 
ure of his new kingdom before it was even 
begun, either took no chances, because he dealt 
with a certainty, or he took all chances—and 
won! But, at any rate, the method of transmis- 
sion that he risked was that of intensifying 
rather than of multiplymg. He convinced a 
few men utterly, that was all. He convinced a 
few men that he was deathless and that they 


226 CHAOS AND A CREED 


were. He offered no other argument than 
these men in proof of his thesis that he had 
come to give life to the world. 

Dearer to Jesus than the blood in his veins 
was the establishment of an ideal common- 
wealth which, against the dark seethe of chaos, 
should ever in its growing structure embody 
the clarity and stability of the ordered pur- 
poses of God. This was the dream Jesus died 
for and yet he risked its very existence on his 
faith in men. Mad and mistaken he may well 
have been, but he apparently believed that if 
individual men could be lifted each to his full- 
est capacities, there would necessarily arise a 
commonwealth as stable and as vigorous as 
a mounting vine. Deducing Jesus’s theory of 
government from his three years’ conduct, such 
would seem to have been his process of reason- 
ing. Therefore, he did not try to make his 
“Kingdom of the Heavens,” he merely tried 
to make men. To him the argument was irre- 
futable, that if men failed to make his king- 
dom, then he had failed to make them men. 

Only twelve men chosen to transmit to all 
tume Jesus’s theories of human growth and of 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 227 


human government. It is illuminating to ex- 
amine in these men precisely what qualities 
Jesus considered best fitted for the promulga- 
tion of a transcendent message. These twelve 
men were all poor, and of his little group Jesus 
himself was the poorest. Strange that we mod- 
erns dwell so little on the possible profundity 
of Jesus’s motive in choosing to be a poor man. 
The spread of Christianity is a satiric refuta- 
tion of our popular argument that it requires 
money to publish truth. Jesus intrusted him- 
self no more to money than he did to numbers. 
Jesus’s chosen missionaries were day laborers, 
villagers, men who had worked with their hands 
as Jesus himself had done. Poor men, for they 
had to be brave men, not men constantly afraid 
of losing possessions with which they felt their 
very identity to be incorporated. Men who 
knew they would be themselves without a 
penny in their purses, would be men ready to 
accept Jesus’s command, “Provide no gold, 
nor even silver nor copper to carry in your 
pockets; no bag for your journey, nor change 
of linen nor shoes.”’ Thus free of handicap, 
such men would be constantly reinforced 


228 CHAOS AND A CREED 


through putting God to the proof. Jesus had 
his reasons for choosing laboring men to lay 
the foundations of a Christian structure, for 
men accustomed to the inexorable realities of 
wood and sailcloth and net would be them- 
selves the strongest witness to the reality of a 
dream. Sturdy fishermen do not drop oar and 
seine without a conviction worth any man’s 
examining. Tragically pressed for time as he 
was, Jesus had to make swift, infallible judg- 
ments in finding missionaries equipped to 
preach his theories. Poor men could best ex- 
emplify the interrelation of creed and conduct, 
for they cannot indulge in any mental luxuries, 
they cannot afford to hold theories they do not 
practice. Selecting them from out the stum- 
bling onward caravan march of humanity, 
Jesus had to have men who did not carry a 
crippling pack of materialism on their backs, 
that pitiful weight of treasure from the past, 
but men who would press forward to spiritual 
adventure, fearless in their naked strength. 
Jesus chose ignorant, but not witless, men 
as the heralds of his new commonwealth. 
Among the Jewish intellectuals of his day 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 229 


learning was an idol worshiped, an idol unre- 
lated to everyday suffering and everyday enig- 
mas, but in Galilee this was not so. There men 
still reverenced wisdom, and sought it where 
the Jewish prophets had found it, in study of 
the desert and of the sea and of the seething 
lives of commonplace people. Of all the Jews 
of their day, the Galileans were those least 
crippled by servility toward the erudition of 
the scribes and Pharisees. The learned priests 
come to argue subtleties of doctrine with Jesus, 
but it is astonishing to observe how little the 
humble-minded friends of Jesus seem to have 
been concerned with the doctrinal disputes, 
either of the Pharisees or of modern theology. 
They seem to be dominated by a personality 
so beautiful that they forget dogmas. “To 
whom else shall we go? Thou hast the words of 
eternal life,” shows how quickly a sturdy Gali- 
lean realist perceived the authenticity of the 
message Jesus was trying to write upon time. 
No dense wall of intellectual pride hid Jesus 
from his rustic followers as it hid him from 
the proud scholars of Jerusalem. The men on 
whom he left his indelible handwriting were 


230 CHAOS AND A CREED 


men not illiterate, but yet incapable of all 
literary achievement. Their lack of imagina- 
tion and appreciation as one reads about them 
is as dumfounding as it is convincing. All of 
them were powerless to invent what they had 
not seen; in fact, they seem almost powerless 
to describe what they did see. However we 
try to explain away Jesus, to attribute his ex- 
istence to the literary invention of his disciples, 
is a laughable evasion of evidence, an evasion of 
which in any other subject but religion, any in- 
tellectual among us would be ashamed. Jesus, 
in that inscrutable wisdom of his, forestalled 
the doubts of the modern and subtle when he 
selected to transmit him, men who were inca- 
pable of inventing him. The men who were 
the first to give Jesus to the world had these 
advantages: they were Orientals, with that sin- 
gular training in verbal memory that is still 
exhibited in the training of Mohammedan boys 
to-day; and they were Jews, and as Jews en- 
dowed with that gift of a unique spiritual per- 
ception which in its highest manifestation has 
attained to the leadership of the world’s emer- 
gentidealism. And yet, except as the contagion 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 231 


of Jesus’s words and presence quickened their 
sluggish intellects, his associates were dullards. 
It is necessary for a student to take into ac- 
count the ignorance not only of his immediate 
disciples, but also of the whole period that he 
selected for his entrance into history. It was a 
period which, as I have earlier shown, had no 
knowledge of chronology. It would be hard 
to find anywhere to-day a ten-year-old child 
with as little sense of historical perspective as 
even the most learned rabbi of Jesus’s day. 
This absence of all perception of chronology 
actually gave the companions of Jesus a su- 
perior advantage—unhampered by concepts of 
time they could readily describe a timeless char- 
acter. Because they are not trying to give 
sequence, they can the better paint spirit. The 
gospel portrait is the direct effect on simple 
receptive minds of actual association with aman 
who himself thought and moved freely in terms 
of eternity. 

The companions of Jesus were without 
worldly experience, grossly provincial. They 
had experience, of course, of the profundities 
of life and death and all the blind mysteries of 


232 CHAOS AND A CREED 


everyday living, love and ambition and effort 
and disillusion, but they were utterly un- 
touched by the effete civilization of ancient 
Rome. Their shrewd sense of realities pene- 
trated all its flimsy posing, all the pomp of 
its decay. Those rustics who were to become 
the apostles of a clean, new, spiritual era were 
men able to detect beneath the perfume of 
Roman culture the stench of bestiality. They 
were, therefore, men far enough advanced in 
evolutional development to appreciate the 
stark spirituality of such a psychological truth 
as, whosoever looketh after 2 woman to lust 
after her, hath already committed adultery 
with her in his heart. 

Jesus, wishing above all other things, to 
teach the dignity of man, had to select as teach- 
ers men who were no respecters of persons. 
Those Galilean fisher-folk had no prestige of 
their own, and no respect for it in others. They 
were not netted in social distinctions. 'The old 
aristocrat crept to Jesus by night, but Peter 
and James and*John had no caste to lose in 
coming to him by day. Judas is the only one 
of the twelve who cringes before the priests 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 233 


and struts before the constabulary. The apos- 
tles were not men debilitated by having power 
over their fellows, power which it is always a 
temptation to abuse. They were not coerced 
by possessing authority over others, for au- 
thority, social or governmental or military or 
ecclesiastical or intellectual, must always be 
remembered and lived up to, for fear one may 
lose it. The apostles were the possessors of 
their own souls, therefore could more freely 
yield those souls to this new rustic rabbi. Un- 
weakened by the possession of power them- 
selves, these Galileans were, at the same time, 
so little servile to the power of the current gov- 
ernment, religion, law, and science that they 
readily accepted the authority of a new leader- 
ship. The church of Jerusalem had no strangle 
hold on the sturdy Judaism of Galilee, there- 
fore the Galileans could receive the teaching 
of an excommunicated man. As independent 
as they were humble, the Galilean fishermen 
sacrificed no social position when they asso- 
ciated hourly with an outcast. Jesus could 
recreate his twelve, all but one, because they 
were men who could recognize him. 


234 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Poor men they were, the twelve, and igno- 
rant and provincial and obscure, and such they 
might have remained forever, instead of having 
become the almoners to all humanity of its 
greatest riches, its deepest wisdom, its widest 
vision, its noblest power. One of these men 
speaks of his own transfiguration, Peter ad- 
dressing Mark: 


“But when you write this you can say 

‘A certain young man,’ leaving out your name, 
You may not wish to have it known ’twas you 
Who ran away, as I would like to hide 

How I fell into sleep and failed to watch 

And afterwards declared I knew him not: 
But as for me, omit no thing. The world 

Will gain by seeing me rise out of weakness 
To strength, and out of fear to boldness. Time 
Has wrought his wonders in me, I am rock.” ? 


Twelve men Jesus selected to preserve his 
words, to draw his portrait. One of these, 
through slow years of invisible companionship, 
he transfigured into that page of all human 
pages most receptive to his imprint. And yet 
the supreme testimony of the twelve friends of 


* The Gospel of Mark, Edgar Lee Masters. 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 235 


Jesus is not to his words and not to his por- 
trait. It is rather that, being men as actual 
and as human as you or I, they stand to all 
time as testimony to Jesus’s power to recreate. 


Three Men Who Knew Jesus 
I 


There were only twelve apostles, but there 
might have been another, the only man whom 
the gospels record as able to resist that mag- 
netic, “Follow me.” Only three men is Jesus 
described as “loving’—Lazarus, John, and 
this one other, for whom, as he looked into his 
face, he is said to have felt all a lonely man’s 
sudden yearning affection. Forth from that 
long blind march of humanity that daily 
streamed past Jesus’s searching eyes, as he 
plodded unheeded by the roadside, there flashes 
one day a radiant figure. Rich, learned, cul- 
tured, illustrious, a young man comes running 
to fall on his knees before the dusty wayside 
preacher. “Master of all goodness,” he cries, 
“what must I do to possess the secret of this 
strange new life you teach?” 


236 CHAOS AND A CREED 


They are possibly just of an age, those two 
who gaze into each other’s eyes with mutual 
longing, the poor man and the rich. 

“Surely you know all the ancient rules of 
goodness—why is it that you come to me for 
more?” 

“T have kept them all, unsatisfied. Tell me 
the living secret that shines in you.” 

“Have you the courage to walk naked of 
riches and learning and ease and fame, alone 
with me in this my adventure?” 

Decision swinging in the balance, momen- 
tous. Before Jesus a man equipped beyond all 
other men he met to understand him and to 
blazon his message to a groping world. We 
do not know that young man’s name, but had 
he accepted the emancipation at that moment 
offered him, it might have become the name 
of a leader second only to Jesus himself in 
advancing human freedom. 

The moment passed. The young man turned 
back from his soul, standing before him in 
its naked beauty, eager for its strange new 
path. The young ruler walked away, heavily, 
shrunken to the measure of his fetters. Per- 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 2387 


haps Jesus was only a man; if so, he must have 
been the most enfranchising friend any other 
man could have possessed. Perhaps Jesus was 
God, briefly tenting in human flesh; if so, one 
man, a coward, refused his companionship in 
that short earth-sojourn, because, so the old 
narrative tells, he was shackled to his money. 


IT 


All the world was loser when the rich young 
man refused his freedom, for all the world can 
see his transcendent fitness to be a page for 
Jesus’s inscribing, but to the end of time no 
one will understand why Jesus chose Judas 
one of his twelve. How lightly we all scorn 
Judas, Judas who scorned Jesus just as lightly 
as we do! In all the gospels there is no man 
whom we know so little, and no man whom we 
condemn so quickly. We see in him only a 
mocker and a cynic, reverencing neither God 
nor man, without enough respect for human 
nature to reverence his own self, a petty soul 
shriveled to the size of his own convictions of 
human bestiality. Judas had no barriers of 
personal idealism to protect him from the logie 


238 CHAOS AND A CREED 


of his own conclusions. If money is power, 
why not steal it? If priest and Roman have 
sway over our comfort, why not be a syco- 
phant? If love is merely an animal instinct, 
why not betray with a kiss? Judas’s attitude 
toward Jesus is derision, irritation. He studies 
Jesus in order to know how best to get rid of 
him as a popular hero. Mary’s adoration is to 
him superstition; her broken alabaster box dis- 
gusts him. He flmgs away from the scene, 
straight to the priests, for this upstart teacher 
who occasions such a waste of people’s money 
and emotion is amenace. Yet perhaps the only 
difference between Judas, the mocker, and 
John, the apostle, is that John was capable of 
believing a man could be a god, and Judas was 
incapable of believing a man could be anything 
but an animal. 

Such is the Judas that we see, but possibly 
it was not the Judas that Jesus saw. In all lit- 
erature there is no friendship on record so 
incomprehensible as Jesus’s choice of Judas. 
Is it the work of a fool tossing gems to swine, 
or of a God possessing the leisure of all eter- 
nity for his perfecting of each man’s creation? 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 239 


Is it witness of one whose destiny was to share 
every human experience, even failure? Was 
it that he might undergo every form of human 
torture in order forever to still our cowardly 
lips of their complaints that Jesus spoke all his 
teaching gazing into Judas’s little ugly ferret 
eyes of derision? Of all the men Jesus met, 
Judas was the most hostile, yet back of the 
mocking contempt did Judas’s master perhaps 
perceive Judas a lonely man, and hungry? 
What strange possibility did Jesus divine that 
like the grain of an unconquerable seed planted 
in him, was powerful enough to cause his re- 
morse? If Judas had been only the Judas that 
we see, he would have been no more sorry for 
Jesus’s death than were Pilate and the priests 
and the mob. The most obstinate page that 
Jesus ever found for his inscribing, and yet, 
what of the witness to Jesus in that crash of 
silver coins flung upon the pavement, in that 
crash of a body flung upon the stones? 


Ill 


In that far-off past, one man lived capable 
of perceiving the Jesus of to-day. The su- 


240 CHAOS AND A CREED 


preme foundation for my faith is the gospel 
of John. I believe that in that gospel God 
wrote himself upon a man’s soul in imperish- 
able terms which will become clearer as, cen- 
tury by century, the spiritual perception of 
the race grows clearer. I do not believe that 
any man has ever lived who could have in- 
vented, the gospel of John. Ineffable words 
imply an ineffable speaker; a transcendent por- 
trait implies a transcendent original. All de- 
nials of the authenticity of John’s book seem 
to me quaint. Materialists substitute for its 
writer a highly developed ape, rationalizing his 
instinct for self-preservation into a religion. 
Christians who think that they have rejected 
the gospel of John seem to me even quainter, 
for that book is woven into the fiber of every 
Christian. No man who has read the four- 
teenth chapter of John is ever the same man 
afterward; however he may deny his growth, 
that chapter has sown in his soul an invincible 
seed. Once having read the fourth gospel, you 
cannot by any reach of effort escape reading 
the other three in its light. However much 
the intellect may deny the evidence, the spirit 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 241 


yields itself utterly to the Jesus of John, just 
as once a Galilean fisherman yielded himself 
to his friend, the carpenter. 

John’s utter fusion with his friend’s beauty 
was not accomplished in three brief years of 
sight and touch. John’s book is the testimony 
of a man who had not only spoken with the 
actual Jesus, but who afterward through sev- 
enty long years or more had lived him. John 
was an old man, visioned by the testing of his 
faith, who lived on into a day of doubt and 
question. Of all the evangels, his is the most 
vital for to-day. Of all four, it is the Jesus of 
John who stands forth as imperishably divine. 
Yet it is with an inspired foreknowledge of our 
present, that John establishes that divinity on 
no miracle but that of character. John reveals 
a flesh-and-blood Christ; his account has the 
small, momentous evidences of the eye-wit- 
ness. The Jesus of John is a most human man; 
he has tricks of speech, of vocabulary, of ges- 
ture, of manner, a plain man’s burning oratory 
and denunciation, a villager’s shrewd and 
sunny humor, a friendly man’s sudden wistful 
appeal for friendship, and yet, with all his 


242 CHAOS AND A CREED 


homely intimacy with his friends, he has flashes 
of a mysterious aloofness and of a mysterious 
communion with unseen powers. Jesus’s in- 
carnation would have been a sorry travesty if 
he, taking flesh, had remained an abstraction. 
The Jesus that John knew was the most highly 
individualized individual who ever existed. He 
was the most personal person who ever lived. 
Therefore, too alive to swathe himself in mere 
words, his transmission was dependent on his 
power to win devotion from his friends. 
John was a human man whose character pos- 
sessed unique capacities for reflecting the char- 
acter of a friend. An impulsive young Gali- 
lean, dauntless for adventure, dropping every- 
thing to follow through the streets a man whose 
passing face had mastered him; ignorant, yet 
deeply learned in the most spiritual literature 
the world has yet produced ; inexperienced, but 
capable of reading all humanity’s experience 
in the all-pitying eyes of the carpenter of Gali- 
lee; obscure, but capable of a vision wide as 
the reaches of earth and heaven. Yet until 
Jesus touched him, only a fisher-boy squatting 
over his net on the beach. John is the greatest 


THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JESUS 243 


example earth has offered of what Jesus can 
do to aman. Jesus came to earth, and Judas 
laughed at him, and in Judas we are all for- 
ever shamed. We should remember that when 
the Creator for a little while inhabited flesh, 
he found one page made beautiful for his writ- 
ing; we should remember that one man of us 
had attained that power of love which fitted 
him to be the biographer of God. 


The Continuation of the Autobiography 


“There is nothing new in the teaching of 
Jesus,” so all of us have at some time argued, 
at moments when we were feeling too proud 
to associate with anyone so commonplace as 
the carpenter-Christ. “There have been proph- 
ets before him, and prophets since; there 
have been idealists in every place and among 
every race. Other men than Jesus have pro- 
claimed, So should men act; other men than 
Jesus have announced, Such is God. What 
is there in the principles or the person of this 
Jesus that makes his autobiography above that 
of all other men, worth studying?” Perhaps 
there is nothing new in Jesus’s teaching, noth- 


24:4 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ing new in Jesus himself. After countless cen- 
turies of gardening science and gardening ex- 
periment, there comes into existence a certain 
fruit; there is nothing new about that fruit 
except its perfection. After ages of patient 
creation there comes into history a certain man; 
there is nothing new about that man except 
that he is perfect. Here and there against the 
dark course of twenty centuries there has ap- 
peared a flaming handwriting. Here and there 
against dark soil there has gleamed the green 
flame of a living bush, but on the whole, the 
teaching of Jesus remains new because it has 
been denied experiment. Here and there along 
black, bewildered streets have passed shining 
men and women whose kindled faces bore wit- 
ness that they had seen the risen Christ, but 
on the whole, Jesus remains new because he has 
been denied resurrection. In the dark, haunted 
archives of human history, sinister with ques- 
tioning, the autobiography of Jesus, golden 
with promise, is a book as yet hardly begun. 


Chapter VIII: Creation Versus 
Chaos 


HERE runs throughout the world to-day an 

undercurrent of strange expectancy. We 
cannot say whether this expectancy is made up 
of hope or of terror. We all feel it as mystery. 
Beneath an outward security, surmised as tran- 
sient and superficial, we are each of us con- 
scious of momentous forces stirring in the dark- 
ness. The shell shock of the last decade has 
left us still palsied and apprehensive. We are 
divided into the many that huddle back to the 
old pre-war defenses, and the brave adven- 
turous few that cannot visualize safety where 
bombs may fall and again raze our house walls 
and expose our souls like gutted ruins to the 
pitiless wind and sun and rain. Impelled by 
the smoldering devastation behind them, there 


are those who would rather become pioneers of 
245 


246 CHAOS AND A CREED 


some untracked forest or barren coast. We 
hardly know which way to turn from danger, 
back or forward. There are moments when we 
would barter our souls for a clear decision or 
for a confident leader. 

Sometimes it is as if each one of us, alone, in 
a black mist, heard all about him the crashing 
of a battle, not perceiving which side to fol- 
low, yet knowing that his very life depends on 
following the one or the other. Sometimes it 
appears as if the powers that move forward 
and the powers that turn back had once again 
met for a combat as absolute as in the old story 
of Michael and Lucifer. Before 1914 we flat- 
tered ourselves that there was a wide middle 
ground between the two armies, where we 
might cultivate, each his own tiny field in the 
sunshine and each of us go cozily bustling about 
his own little affairs. But all that pleasant mid- 
dle ground is to-day wiped out by a blackness 
in which unseen hosts are heard advancing. 
Who are they? What are they? Not to join 
is to be trampled, and yet which ranks may 
one dare to join? 

It makes small difference that this confusion 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 247 


is of thought only, that externally our daily 
lives are running on for a while with the 
smoothness of their previous momentum. It is 
perhaps this very concentration of our thought 
processes that is in itself troublous. ‘To-day 
no one can escape thinking. Somehow the 
strange cosmic stir has got inside of our brains 
and, to our dismay, drives them on and on re- 
lentlessly to solve problems, to impose some 
sort of order, no matter what, each man upon 
his own private chaos. Yet in all this there is 
hope. Chaos is that which has not yet sub- 
mitted to the laws of creation, and thus chaos 
may be either cosmic or merely the seething 
turmoil of each man’s intellect. Yet in either 
aspect, when chaos has once become conscious 
that it is chaos, it has become ready for crea- 
tion. Perhaps this curious suspense that 
throughout the world at present stays so much 
of needed public action and of needed private 
initiative is that once again, as long ago, all 
chaos waits, dark and breathless, for a Voice 
to say, “Let there be light.” 

Yet perhaps to-day that Voice itself is wait- 
ing for our own voices to speak those words, 


248 CHAOS AND A CREED 


now when once again a black universe trem- 
bles forward toward dawn. Do we yet value 
our birthright of groping? Looking within 
ourselves at the blind march of our thoughts, 
looking beyond ourselves at the blind march of 
humanity, do we never take delight in climbing 
up and away from the little pressing humdrum 
activities of our days, to meet, each son of God 
among us, the challenge of chaos to our own 
soul? Finite and human and mistaken as may 
be any man’s solution of this world in which 
he finds himself briefly placed, may not each 
humblest individual effort toward clarity 
strengthen by just so much the power of the 
whole race for its creation? Which of us to-day 
is too drowsy to be conscious of the far, deep 
stir of mysterious forces in this familiar earth? 
Once long ago a garden, in the blackness that 
preceeds dawn, lay in hushed expectancy, and 
in that breathlessness each tiniest seed grew 
aware of the mounting rumble of an earth- 
quake that should roll away a stone from be- 
fore a tomb. 

It matters little with what mergent pictures 
we visualize our present confusion, familiar 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 249 


refuges smoldering behind us and unattempted 
wilderness before; or a black night trampled 
by plunging armies; or the brink of the world 
again waiting as millions of years ago, for its 
own emergence; or an endless, wistful caravan 
driven forever on from out a mysterious past 
into a mysterious future; all the pictures give 
the same impression, that of some solemn choice 
before which we stand in a suspense not much 
longer to be endured. We cannot define this 
feeling in the air all about us, but in some 
strange way we know that each man of us, each 
nation of us, must presently move in one direc- 
tion or the other, irrevocably. . 

Any man who would wrest from all this dis- 
order his own creed must examine not effects 
and events, but the mentality back of those 
effects, testing it in the light of his own con- 
victions to see whether it is a mentality set for 
progress or for retardation. ‘Throughout this 
book I have maintained that for me the clue to 
the universe is the personality of Jesus, so that 
my analysis of present-day chaos becomes 
merely an expansion of that belief. Jesus’s 
character is the only argument Jesus himself 


250 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ever made for his divinity. It is in the light of 
his perfection that I examine what to me is an 
evolution too marvelous to be accidental; if not 
accidental, then at every moment of its many 
million years, divinely ordered. All our pres- 
ent anarchy is, to my own mind, due to our 
blind resistance of the laws of our creation. As 
a summary of all that I have tried to say, I 
state that I have come to regard those laws as 
three, and to believe that for any nation or indi- 
vidual to transgress any one of them, means 
not only suffering but disintegration. Some 
degree of order, however humble, has begun 
to be imposed upon chaos as soon as any man 
has made his guesses at the laws of progress. 
When he has proceeded a step farther, and set 
himself intrepidly to obey those surmised laws, 
he has consecrated himself one tiny factor in 
racial advance. There is a patriotism of time 
as well as of country; every man owes this era 
the courage of his own convictions. 

It is a period when not to think for oneself 
is perilous, and when not to act for oneself in 
choosing one of the two momentous roads be- 
fore us is even more perilous. In an age when 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 251 


all authority has become obscured, we do not 
yet appreciate our high opportunity for indi- 
vidual adventure. ‘To what man now promi- 
nent in business or government or literature or 
religion do people look with whole-hearted con- 
fidence? To-day while the superficial authority 
of our economics, of the state, of philosophy, 
of the churches, still holds, the real authority 
that comes only from the spiritual acquiescence 
of the governed is gone. Of this fact business 
and politics and literature and religion are all 
aware and betray their apprehension in an 
hysterical insistence on all the externalities of 
the old compliance. This apprehension and in- 
sistence are quite unnecessary, for the external 
structure of our living is exactly that which is 
not in the least jeopardized by the new yeasty 
processes that are leavening our thoughts. 
Where there are always extremists who believe 
an external upheaval will mean a spiritual ref- 
ormation, to-day the great majority are too 
sane and too observant to trust any such absurd 
premise. We are all of us thinking, as indi- 
viduals, more deeply than we have ever thought 
before, but precisely in order that this strange 


252 CHAOS AND A CREED 


new activity within us may have opportunity 
for parturition, we would preserve all the secu- 
rity of outward institutions. We desire freedom 
to think quietly just because we do not desire to 
act hastily. Yet it is quite true that authority, 
in the old sense, as a real power in the world, has 
passed away, but there is steadily coming into 
existence a new authority, and at this very 
hour, wherever any individual in the ranks of 
business, government, literature, or religion 
avails himself of the new standard of measure- 
ment, he is accorded a popular support, which 
is still as little generally perceived and em- 
ployed as some hidden mountain torrent. Any 
man anywhere could become a great leader to- 
day if he should base his leadership, fearlessly, 
in word and deed, upon this new torrential 
force. For one form of leadership an expectant 
world is ready. 

Before a world that waits for our decision, 
humanity has reached that stage in its evolution 
when it stands free to accept or to refuse its 
further creation. If we refuse, we shall still 
be forced through slow centuries of blood and 
pain to submit to the Creator’s will that we 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 253 


rise to our destined stature. It is at this mo- 
ment within the power of every man, of every 
country, and of all the race, to obey the laws 
of evolution and to advance, or to disobey them, 
and thus indefinitely to retard our ascent. At 
this hour, our Creator has permitted us at last 
clearly to co-operate in our own perfecting. 
With more reverence for his creature than his 
creature has for him, he offers us our choice, 
and like all the world, he, too, stands waiting. 

To me, one humble adventurer of the unseen, 
these are the three laws of our development. 
Evolution starts with nothingness, within 
which stirs a mysterious seed of life, pushing 
steadfastly up and up throughout all the fath- 
omless patience of 1,600,000,000 years, first 
from the mere flicker of light upon water, ever 
on through myriad forms, on from the one- 
celled amceba, on to the animal constantly more 
highly differentiated, no two individuals among 
plants or birds or reptiles ever alike, ever on 
and on to the highest aspect that we know, the 
infinite variety of human character. The per- 
fection of personality would seem to be the pri- 
mary law of evolution. If we obey that law, all 


254 CHAOS AND A CREED 


the structure of our society should be adjusted 
to it. While each individual should be provided 
with the stability of custom and _ tradition, 
within which he may advance personally secure, 
all organization should be arranged with the 
free play of individuality as its fundamental 
aim. Industry should be frankly motived not 
merely to make money, but to make men. Just 
in so far as we cripple initiative, we cripple the 
race. Not the easy manipulation of masses, 
but the responsibility of the state to the indi- 
vidual should be the purpose of any govern- 
ment humble enough and aspirant enough to 
try to share the Creator’s method of creating 
a nation. 

It was Jesus’s practice to work not by any 
incoherent mass-production of ideals, not by 
any form of widely syndicated influence, but 
by the energizing of individuals and of small 
units, and using these as a dynamic leaven of 
the whole. Observing what Jesus was able to 
accomplish by means of twelve men recreated, 
we perceive one never-to-be-forgotten fact. 
While the perfecting of personality is a basic 
principle of evolution, personality is never an 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 255 


end, but a means. Any man that tries to be 
merely himself, shrinks. Jesus transformed 
twelve timid slaves of circumstance into kings 
of their own souls, in order that they might 
lay the foundation of his kingdom of earth. 
The Creator would by his inexorable law create 
us men that we may become ourselves creators, 
equipped to transform all chaos into a struc- 
ture fit for our own innate divinity. 

The second law is the corollary of the first, 
the law of leadership. The race moves forward 
not by any form of herd-adventure, not by any 
mass movement from the rear of the caravan, 
not by any driving force of instincts from our 
fear-haunted past. Demagogues who exploit 
those herd-impulses like a goad, cause merely 
a terrorized stampede. ‘The race advances not 
by means of those who lash us from the rear, 
but by means of brave individual adventurers 
who press on, alone, into the black mist before 
them, and cry back courage to the ranks be- 
hind. Individual men and women, bold ex- 
plorers of the unproved, have always been the 
luminous salients that pierce for the rest of us 
the darkness of chaos. Slowly, with growing 


256 CHAOS AND A CREED 


courage, the hesitant mass has followed, until 
it came abreast of its captains. The common- 
wealth of the future will seek to provide condi- 
tions that permit the emergence of generalship. 
And yet perhaps to-day, in our dark bewilder- 
ment, the conditions were never more favor- 
able for the making of leaders, but we demand 
of them a new test of fitness, a test that as yet 
neither we nor they recognize with sufficient 
clearness. 

The third law of evolution is the law of its 
direction, invincibly upward. At the one end 
the brute, at the other, surely the man, and 
perhaps the god. Each man, each nation, now 
stands gazing at the parting of the roads, one 
leading back toward the animal, the other on 
toward the man. If we revert to bestial coward- 
ice, even so, it will not be forever. Our animal 
security will prove a false dependence, and 
we shall be forced from it upward, to our des- 
tiny. But how much worthier of our manhood 
that, convinced, not compelled, we should at 
once accept the adventure now offered us! 
Those two armies that we seem to hear strug- 
gling in the darkness, are actual enough, the 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 257 
one comprising all agencies, which, by basing 
every action public and private on animal mo- 
tives, would turn us back, and the other, that 
host which resents being stampeded by the 
brute instincts of cowardice and hatred, and 
demands new captains brave enough to pene- 
trate the untried future. Steadily, under the 
sure hand of the Creator, we have risen from 
out the primal slime until we possess upright 
bodies, and intellects matched to an endless 
quest. Knitted always into our development, 
rudimentary at first, and quaint in its guesses 
at its own nature and at the nature of God, 
there was growing in us a still nobler endow- 
ment. Along with the fluency of our muscles 
and the daring of our brains, there was stead- 
fastly evolving the beauty of our souls. Any 
creed that does not include in its data the mys- 
tery of human beauty and of human aspiration, 
and is at least reverent before the enigma of 
origin that they present, is not only superficial 
but fanatic, and, in its effect on conduct, retro- 
gressive. In so far as Freudianism explains our 
animal instincts, it emancipates us through 
self-knowledge; but in so far as it justifies 


258 CHAOS AND A CREED 


those instincts, it helps to perpetuate them. 
Shall we to-day believe that we are animals, 
no more responsible than a lizard adapting 
itself to the sunshine on a wall, or—a theory 
a trifle more rational—shall we believe that we 
are machines of a fathomless intricacy, which is 
entirely due to accident, or shall we believe that 
we are men capable of rising to the full stature 
of the soul’s aspiration? The alternative before 
us to-day is to use or to refuse our spiritual 
faculties. The capacities of the soul are incal- 
culable, but untested. The choice is as clear as 
it is momentous: do we prefer to spend all our 
seventy years cringing with hatred or bold with 
service? New faculties demand our faith in 
them, lest they atrophy and poison our being 
with decay. ‘The world waits each man’s choice; 
fear, or adventure, which? 

Of the two forces that to-day struggle for 
control, the sinister one is the better organized, 
the more articulate, the more outwardly effec- 
tive, since it possesses all the advantages of cus- 
tom and habit, all the obsolete defenses once 
needed by the savage in his jungle, but it is a 
force doomed, because it resists the inexorable 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 259 


tendencies of human development. It frightens 
personal initiative, it pits the impulses of the 
crowd against the idealism of leaders, and it 
seeks its ends by purely materialist methods, 
in a day when all civilization has become de- 
pendent on the use of spiritual standards. 
Whatever noble guises the power of retro- 
gression wears for its own confidence, it is a 
dangerous power, because it is blind. Ina mad 
panic of self-protection, it fails to see that 
there is nothing in the world that requires so 
much of sheer intelligence as does safety. 

All this sounds like mere abstraction, but it 
is the kind of abstraction that any man can 
apply to his own newspaper this very morning 
and to his own conduct this very day. With 
one or the other of the two opposing powers 
locked in struggle, every man or woman of 
us must enlist, fearlessly and without com- 
promise. Of the two armies, the one that faces 
forward is immeasurably the stronger, but it is 
as yet lacking in coherence, and in vision, and 
in certainty of aim. The rising tide against 
materialism is torrential, but uncontrolled. It 
rests with each one of us to give it effective- 


260 CHAOS AND A CREED 


ness. We shall accomplish this just in so far 
as we intrepidly deny ourselves the methods 
in use by the opposition. The idealism that 
eight years ago rose to the flood has never 
really disappeared. It only needs clear mo- 
tives for its present direction. Our side will 
win, because our side goes with and not against 
the course of nature. But how soon our 
side shall conquer, and how completely, de- 
pends as never before in all time on each indi- 
vidual man and woman. On the strength of 
each one’s personal convictions, on the bravery 
of each one’s personal actions, depends all 
further course of human progress. Have we 
the courage to follow the upward road, rev- 
erencing to the uttermost the law of initiative, 
the law of leadership, the law of spiritual 
standards? 

Just in so far as in one smallest degree any 
one of us falls back on the outworn methods 
that mean retrogression, we shall fail. We 
must fearlessly reject every appeal that is 
based on any form of fear, for all fear chains 
us to the jungle. In sober practicality we must 
assert the standards of the soul and refuse to 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 261 


measure our stature by our power to destroy 
life, to injure an enemy, or to make money. 
If we believe that humanity has a soul, we 
must prove it or join the army that denies it. 
Hither we possess spiritual faculties or we do 
not. The only way to discover is to use them. 
In all the general bewilderment, however, 
it is difficult for the individual always to know 
in which direction he is facing, back toward 
the smoldering ruin, or on toward the hidden 
future. There is one infallible test. There is 
a power abroad in the world to-day with which 
the forces of retrogression do not yet fully 
reckon and in which the forces of progress do 
not yet fully trust. For two thousand years 
there has been tracing upon history a persistent 
handwriting, for two thousand years there has 
been slowly rising a persistent influence. All 
thinkers to-day must reckon with a resurrec- 
tion, remembering that it was a resurrection 
which once conquered Rome. No longer 
swathed in dogma, no longer bound in ritual, 
no longer circumscribed to any creed, but a 
living man, never was Jesus of Nazareth so 
mighty in influence as he is in this hour. 


262 CHAOS AND A CREED 


Once again Jesus has escaped all entomb- 
ment, so that to-day there is no one who does 
not know him by sight. More and more, there- 
fore, are we coming to test all motives and 
activities by his opinion. All of us, then, who 
would assist in humanity’s creation, have only 
to look up from every dilemma into the sane 
and steadfast eyes of the Nazarene. Two thou- 
sand years have not passed in vain, for whether 
we wish it or not the personality of the car- 
penter has now become the criterion of all con- 
duct. Each of us who would go forward un- 
hesitant, needs only boldly to assert that cri- 
terion. Jesus has made himself so familiar to 
all of us that there is no one who does not know 
the instant answer to the question, what would 
Jesus do? There has become one sole measure 
for leadership. Any man who could convince 
us that he followed no mere lip creed, but the 
real person of Jesus of Galilee, could lead us 
anywhere, for, however appearances may ob- 
scure the fact, there is to-day but one accepted 
Leader. 

What do we hear Jesus saying? What do 
we see Jesus doing? That is the sole argument 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 263 


with which to meet the specious reasoning of 
those who would drag us with them back to 
the animal. How would Jesus vote on child 
labor? What would he do in regard to the food 
prepared for market by the day-long toil of 
hands six years old, two years old? What 
would he say about flogging? Can you see him 
wielding the lash?’ What would be his opinion 
of the solitary cell? Would he have helped the 
Herrin miners shoot the scabs? Would he have 
helped the mine-owners to evict their tenants? 
Can you see him raining bombs from the sky? 
Can you watch him inventing a poison gas? 
Would Jesus have waited until the Germans 
invaded Belgium, or dealing as he always did, 
not with conduct, but with the mentality back 
of conduct, would Jesus have stopped the 
World War where it began, in the German 
primary schools, where in child minds the love 
of country, that holiest emotion, next to the 
love of God, known to man, was polluted and 
turned from beautiful service to friend-nations 
into ugly fear of bugaboo foes? 

Is there one man who does not know Jesus’s 
answer to these questions? And more than 


264 CHAOS AND A CREED 


that, how many silent thousands of us agree 
absolutely with Jesus’s answer! Then why do 
we not ourselves speak that same answer 
boldly? Only, as each of us knows, because we 
are afraid! Yet if even for one day we should 
each raise his voice, asserting Jesus’s reply to 
any public question, what an invincible array 
we should even overnight become! It would 
not need thousands. Suppose one hundred 
men, each standing for one moment of the day 
alone with God, and saying, “Reveal to me 
how I to-day may help to build the common- 
wealth of Christ,” what might the consecrated 
energy of one hundred men accomplish! We 
do not in the least realize our present advan- 
tage, for the world is waiting breathless for 
those who might direct its idealism. Every- 
where chaos awaits its creation at our hands. 
It would not need a hundred men. Because 
the seed they planted has been growing for a 
score of centuries, we have an advantage the 
first twelve planters of a new faith did not 
have, so that if to-day any twelve men should 
go forth, each alone, but convinced of an in- 
visible Comrade trudging alongside, any twelve 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 265 


men might accomplish for the twentieth cen- 
tury what the apostles accomplished for the 
first. Or conceive that from the ranks of intel- 
lect and learning there should rise up one man 
as convinced of Jesus’s resurrection as was 
Paul of Tarsus, what light might come to all 
the dark paths of earth from the blazing ora- 
tory of that one man! 

Why are we afraid to assume our creator- 
ship? It cannot be that we prefer chaos, that 
sinister Jungle of beast-fears and beast-hates, 
that blackness from which we have but just 
emerged, with the dawn light on our foreheads. 
Surely we know ourselves indestructible. For 
two reasons I believe myself eternal. Jesus is 
either nothing, or he is in all ways the supreme 
example. I have no concern with what manner 
of body Jesus returned from the grave, but 
that his character survived death is reason for 
my belief that my own character is like his, 
eternal. Further, I cannot believe that evolu- 
tion would devote incalculable millions of years 
to the perfecting of personality, only to anni- 
hilate it in a moment. Individuality is a phe- 
nomenon so impressive that I believe the Crea- 


266 CHAOS AND A CREED 


tor has a use for it after death as before. As I 
look at evolution, it is matter in process of 
turning into spirit, and spirit is indestructible. 
If, then, we are immortal, cannot we lean for a 
little while from out our eternity, giving full- 
hearted attention to the quest of earth? Who 
knows how beautiful may be this gift of physi- 
cal existence intrusted to each of us—this beau- 
tiful thing named life—hke a rough gem, in 
order that each man’s own hands may shape it 
in accordance with each man’s own faith? We 
are permitted to bring to our work of creation 
all the vision, all the joyousness, all the unhur- 
ried security of those who, themselves eternal, 
build for eternity. 

And for our task of imposing order upon 
chaos, we have leadership that needs only 
each one’s following, each one’s embodying. 
Throughout the course of human thought, it 
can be seen that whenever any man has denied 
the existence of God, he has instantly felt the 
obligation to make a god to replace the one 
he had cast down. ‘There are many such gods 
to-day, but they all show the same blurred 
resemblance to one ideal, except a few that, 


CREATION VERSUS CHAOS 267 


starkly consistent, show the image of the sav- 
age. All the many god-shapes, however, that 
are made with courage reveal that nobler like- 
ness to a face that we have all seen, and can 
never afterward forget, because it is the face 
of that man of all men most alive. For creating 
ourselves in the image of God, we have a lumi- 
nous example. Humanity advances by means 
of adventurous leaders, shining salients that 
penetrate the darkness before us. Always from 
time to time, one man and then another, will 
accept that challenge of chaos to leadership, 
and at his call of assurance we, the hesitant 
majority, will follow until we come abreast 
of him. Yet there is one man we shall forever 
follow but never reach. One man there was 
who, granted for a little while the privilege of 
earth’s chaos, went so far in the lonely ad- 
venture of faith, that he has forever established 
the uttermost reach of human aspiration. 


A Creed 





BELIEVE in « Creator and a creation, two dis- 
| bet and separate facts. I believe that Crea- 
tor to be personal, but his personality to tran- 
scend explanation in terms of my own. I be- 
lieve that creation to be an evolutional world, 
and that the laws of evolution it is possible for 
us, looking back, to ascertain, and looking for- 
ward to prophesy. I believe that at one actual 
historic date, and as one consummate revela- 
tion out of many lesser ones, before and since, 
the Creator chose himself to enter into his crea- 
tion, submitting to every law that he himself 
had established. I believe that by himself as- 
suming human flesh, the Creator revealed to 
humanity for all time its goal. I believe that 
as the Creator chose voluntarily to be an ex- 
ample, he allowed his creatures voluntarily to 
accept or reject that example, then as now. 

268 


A CREED 269 


So far as I possess capacity to fathom the 
motives of his incarnation, I believe them to 
have been: illumination, that we might under- 
stand the laws of our destiny; justice, that we 
might never again complain that we are left 
blind and helpless in a bewildering and perilous 
universe; and a yearning desire that in allow- 
ing us to share our own creation, he himself 
might have companionship in effort. That we 
might never reproach him for unfairness, he 
chose to accept the utmost handicap of his own 
laws, he chose to be a member of a despised 
nation and of its humblest town, to grow to 
self-knowledge through all the slow processes 
of an unlettered intellect, to speak the most 
transcendent message on earth to men dull and 
helpless and obscure, to intrust its transmission 
to mere word of mouth that should later be 
written on a few brief pages, themselves sub- 
ject to all the misapprehension inherent in 
human words. Above all, he chose to be the 
least understood man who ever lived, and to 
be of all human benefactors the one most foully 
rewarded. Thus the Creator might say, “To 


2'70 CHAOS AND A CREED 


which one of you have I assigned such handicap 
as that I assumed? I conquered, so may you.” 

I believe it is possible for any man’s faith 
to roll away all the obscurity that has con- 
demned the God-man to oblivion, and to set 
free a living Comrade whose actuality is proved 
by the power of his presence to enfranchise 
from all fear, and the power of his personality 
to create personality in others. I believe that 
the incarnate Creator was an actual man, liv- 
ing, breathing, historic, and that his name was 
J esus. 

THE END 


Distinguished Novels 


WILD MARRIAGE 
By B. H. LenmMan 


A situation of rare emotional intensity is worked out against a 
background of Harvard and Cambridge which gives a picture of 
university life unique in recent fiction—a picture that will be in- 
stantly recognized by college men. 


THE KENWORTHYS 
By MArGARET WILSON 


This distinguished novel is as much a story of pioneering as Mrs. 
Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Able McLaughlins,” with the 
difference that the pioneering here is on the frontier of modern minds 
and hearts. 


FAITH OF OUR FATHERS 
By Dorothy WatwortH CARMAN 


This dramatic novel of the church and its ministry will appeal to all 
readers within the church or outside it who can appreciate the keen, 
grim humor, the comedy and the tragedy of the brave heart every- 
where in its encounter with worldliness. 


HE WAS A MAN 
By Rost Wivper LANE 


A novel that is alive, with the vigorous, brutal, and romantic life 
of America; realistic, with that realism in which the beautiful and 
the sordid are one thing—the truth. Its pages are crowded with 
living human beings, and Gordon Blake will be remembered, not as 
a character in fiction, but as a man. 


HARPER & BROTHERS 
Publishers Since 1817 


See Harper’s Macazine for Announcements of the 
better Schools and Colleges 





Novels of Adventure 


THE THUNDERING HERD 
By ZANE GREY 


A new story of the old west—of buffalo hunters and cowboys, of 
plainsmen and Indians on the war-path. The whole colorful epoch of 
the pioneer unrolls before us in this tale, which centers in the destruc- 
tion of the thundering herds of buffalo. 


MOUNTAINS OF MYSTERY 
By ArtHur O. FRIEL 


No lover of high adventure will wish to miss this story of the 
search for a lost white race in the depths of the South American 
wilderness, undertaken by Knowlton, McKay, and red-headed Tim— 
the three redoubtable adventurers whose trails so many readers have 
followed in Mr. Friel’s other books. 


THE FOURTEEN POINTS—CRAIG KENNEDY 
By Artuur B. REEVE 


Craig Kennedy, classic and phenomenally popular figure of detective 
fiction, here appears in a series of stories the scheme of which in- 
cludes an ingenious and absolutely new twist, which invests them 
with all the lure of cross-word puzzles as well as that of first-class 
mysteries. 


CLOTHES MAKE THE PIRATE 
By Hotman Day 


A rollicking sea yarn of Colonial times in Boston, in which a 
timorous but romantically minded tailor masquerades as Dixy Bull, 
pirate and terror of the Maine coast. The results of his escapades are 
as unexpected as they are crammed with hilarity and misadventure. 


HARPER & BROTHERS 


New York 
Established 1817 


See HARPER’S MAGAZINE for Announcements of the 
T 105 better Schools and Colleges. 





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